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The modern day corner shop

27 November 2008
Posted in D.I.Y. Ecommerce - Planning & theory of how to make money online

What made the corner shops successful was convenience, product range and of course hard work by their owners. They were NOT the cheapest and they did NOT have the highest quality merchandise!

There is a new neighborhood and it is seriously lacking in quality retail outlets. It is of course the world wide web. But how can I say it is lacking in retail outlets, there are probably hundreds of thousands, maybe more? Yes there are lots of big stores out there and small niche stores on the web, Amazon, Ebay etc. But remember the corner shop analogy.

Now if you spend say £20,000 + stock and get a store up and running on the Internet you have to create a very high turnover, very quickly to pay your bills. To do this you have to sell the most popular products all of which have the lowest margin for profit. You have to get noticed very quickly and to do this you have to regularly spend loads on on line advertising further eating in to your margins, which are already lower than the 'big boys' because they buy in bigger quantities than you can. All this means is you have to get it right, fast. I am not saying you cannot break into that market its just very expensive and very risky.

Now what about if your shop was almost FREE to open!? What about if your monthly overheads, apart from the stock you actually sold was less than £10 a month? What about if you tapped into one or more of thousands of under exploited niche markets? And what about if your corner shop serviced the whole country, not just a small neighborhood?

That is what this guide is all about. Try doing a search for something fairly niche on Google. Search for 'teddy bears'. Look down the 'sponsored links' at the right hand side of the results. How many of those names are well known brand names? Not that many. How many teddy bears are needed for new babies, birthday presents, valentines presents etc? Every year. Millions probably. What percentage of that market would you need to replace the income you get from a job? Half or 1% at the most? What if you diversified and became a specialist in dolls as well? How much money would you make then?

What if you offered something that NONE of the big companies do. Fast service (at no extra charge), clear pricing (no hidden vat, delivery, packaging etc.), great personal service (actually answer peoples emails with a human response in quick time), accurate full description etc.
You would not only get sales you would get repeat sales and your business would grow. The world wide web is the modern day community and the search engines and the diverse and highly specific manner in which they give search results create the modern day 'corners' which are just begging to be filled with shops. Please note these corners are not geographically defined but created by the vagaries of the search engines.

Now we have already pointed out that the modern day corner shop is not restricted to just one corner but the whole of the country or eventually the world but probably even more significant than this is the range of products available to sell is thousands of times greater than that of the old fashioned corner shop. If you can put it in a box or envelope and send it through the post or via a courier then it is suitable to sell in your shop. Maybe you even have a range of products that you make or plan to make yourself?

This is what is so exciting. The choice of what to sell is almost infinitesimal, the costs, when compared to a regular business are microscopic and there is an abundance of room for new businesses to come on board. The best bit for me however is that for once the big boys with their unwieldy infrastructure and overheads are at a massive disadvantage. Over the coming decade tens of thousands of new 'modern day corner shops' will spring up on the web and take small slices out of the profits of big companies. Sure the big companies will try and buy them up. But as soon as the shop is transferred to the unwieldy shareholder owned, high overhead model of conventional business, then it will lose it's edge.

The time to start your web store is NOW. Open a modern day corner shop and take a slice of the cake. But don't stop there, start a community to support it and web sites earning revenue to compliment it. How many corner shops do you want? If every new shop represents a pay rise, that after initial set up, does not come with a significant increase in labor how many shops will you open?

This guide is damn hard work but the type of rewards it offers are definitely not available through a conventional business. Even through a web business the rewards are probably unachievable when you contract out the creation of sites. Start building your web D.I.Y Ecommerce empire today! But don't give up the day job... yet.