the goose

I have not been a big fan of starting a traditional ‘eCommerce’ site in the past. My biggest concern with it is that there is a lot of physical labour attached to selling physical product online. Not very ‘passive’ in my book. This might be changing however. Amazon’s webstore has been on my mind recently and more particularly – their provisioning services. Using a programming interface – it is possible to have Amazon actually handle physical goods for you. Some someone hanging off the side of an Island in the middle of the Atlantic (well almost) this has a couple of advantages. Chief amongst them is the fact that I don’t need to be based in the US to organise inventory there. I can source my products somewhere in the world – have them shipped to Amazon’s US warehouses and sell directly to the largest online marketplace. More importantly – this is something I can do from anywhere. I can manage this business without having to have any staff or physical premises. Randy Smyth has written up a nice desription of this over on his blog. Randy still handles product before shipping to the Amazon warehouse but there doesn’t seem to be any necessity to do this. You can just have your supplier send the product directly.