Selling Physical Products Online 

There is no reason that anyone needs to be limited to selling digital products. Selling or reselling physical products can be very lucrative. Making a living by purchasing wholesale and reselling on the existing online market places has never been easier. 
  
eBay 
eBay is now the biggest and most well-known auction and shopping site out on the net, with every country having its own local chapter as well as the main international site. The cost varies from country to country and usually you pay a small insertion fee to list your product and a small portion of the selling price (10%) when your item sells. Often, they run special promotion deals and at the moment, the insertion fees for your first 50 listings per calendar month are free. You can also open an eBay store if you wish to sell on a regular basis. There are some very good profits to be made by buying products that are cheap and advertised poorly or with restrictions that you could purchase and re promote attractively at a good markup. 
  
Re-Selling Other People’s Stuff on eBay 
Sometimes you will find items where the people who listed them were not very careful about how they listed them, with no picture, terrible descriptions, no reserve, and other obstacles that have stopped people buying. These can become a real bargain for the smart investor. By buying these items at the right bargain price, and then advertising them properly with good photos and descriptions, it is possible to resell them at a substantial profit for almost no effort. Another good idea is to sell things on behalf of other people who, for whatever reason, do not want to sell it themselves. You just agree to take a mutually agreed upon commission. 
Checking out church fairs, garage sales, antique fairs, estate sales, opportunity shops, and auction houses, you can often find all manners of stuff being sold at a bargain price. These types of things can bring good sale on eBay (or any other similar site). After just a few easy sales, you could potentially double or quadruple your money. 
  
Drop Shipping 
Drop shipping is the ultimate passive income provider. It can be made to be totally automatic with your only input being to check the system and cash the checks. The term drop shipping is when you create an eStore front that offers products from certain manufacturers. The client visits your store, orders a product, or places an order with you, and someone else (usually an assembly company in another country, often India, or somewhere in South East Asia) makes the product inexpensively and ships it directly to the customer. You don’t send the money to the manufacturer until after the client has paid you, so there is no risk involved, you never even see, handle, or do anything with the physical product other than manage the whole process (and even that can be outsourced if you really want). As a seller, this is incredibly efficient because you don’t need to have any inventory, overhead costs, storage costs, and very little liability. So if you have a good idea for a product that could be mass-produced at an economical price, it could be original or something someone else provides, then drop shipping might be a great opportunity for you. 
Once you have a product, by using the drop ship method, you can sell anywhere, as well as in your own store, using companies like eBay or Amazon, or some of the other sites that are mentioned in this chapter to reach the widest audience possible. 
  
Take a look through Amazon at all the products available. The name brands are all there with their huge mark ups (you pay for the name, not necessarily the quality) and all the look-alike products are there as well. Many of them are poorly represented, so if your chosen product is presented properly, your SEO is in place, and you have priced it to compete, there is a lot of money to be made from the 3.5 billion people using the internet. 
  
Craigslist 
Craigslist does not offer the same features as eBay but it’s free and many people find that it is easier and quicker to use. You do not have to join to become a member, although this is an option if you want to be able to keep track of your posts and repost your products. 
  
Etsy 
Etsy is a bit like eBay, but is focused on mostly handmade or vintage products. Perfect if you’re selling anything artsy and crafty as they have an annual turnover in excess of 2 billion dollars and so are popular. 
  
Shopify 
Shopify is very simple and easy to set up. It provides options for you to build your own e-commerce store from scratch. It has an easy to use admin interface with over a hundred mobile responsive themes and loads of amazing add-on apps for all your e-commerce needs. 
  
Weebly 
Weebly is a simple and affordable way to build your own website as well as an online store or blog. You can pick your own or use one of their many themes, put your site together using a handy drag-and-drop creator, download the mobile app and start blogging and selling straight away. It is also a great site to use to manage your ad and promotion campaigns, manage social media channels and craft beautiful newsletters. 
  
Simplesite.com 
This site offers you a free website including a personal domain, unique designs, great customer service, as well as being mobile and tablet optimized, SEO optimized and comes with your own free online store. It’s the perfect way to start an online passive income business on a shoe-string budget. 
  
Selling Other Digital Products 
There are many different types of digital products you can sell, in fact, anything you can think of has a potential market with 3.5 billion people on the net. 
  
Selling Websites and Domain Names 
Flippa.com is a great site for buying and selling websites and domain names and just like many things, including real estate, these can go up in value over time. Often, if you think of a great domain name and it is not taken, you can sell it. If someone wants that name it could be worth a lot and domain names sell from about $10 upwards, with some of the more popular ones fetching several thousand. In fact, sometimes an exceptionally good domain name can be worth many thousands of dollars. Think coca-cola.com or gottahaveacoke.com. This would take a bit of time and knowhow but could produce a nice passive income over time. 
  
Sell Photos 
If you have a good camera and like taking photos, sites like Shutterstock, iStockphoto and Graphic Stock will accept all sorts of high-quality images and then sell them on their sites for a royalty fee. This can provide you with a good steady stream of passive income, as they all have hundreds of thousands of visitors daily. These are the sites many businesses use to easily and conveniently find the pictures they use for their websites and products. The music that you hear when the company you call is busy and you are put on hold, when listening to advertisements, or hear when watching a promotional video or something on you tube, often come from companies who sell stock music in the same way as they sell photos and other images. If you are musically inclined, there is money to be made by recording yourself. There is a steady demand as people search for fresh original talent and you do not have to be a professional to make money at this. 
For those of us who simply like photography or recording yourself or friends playing an instrument, don’t let these images go to waste when you can easily license them through a royalty free website that specializes in stock photos or music. Each time someone uses something you have licensed you could receive a small commission or fee that, over time, could build into a nice little income stream to add to all the other income streams you should be creating.