Electronics Website

[Jon86]

Good afternoon gents,
Recently I've been thinking about the idea of starting my own electronics website to make a bit of cash on the side, but I've been pretty stuck for ideas. I'm in the UK, and here I find that component suppliers for hobbyists are few and far between, especially when it comes to unusual things. Even when there are suppliers they charge a fortune for postage. (£12 for a tiny QFN?  )

So I was thinking, how about a website selling... say, LEDs and their accessories? Cheap, with a low postage cost?
Sorry if this is in the wrong section, or maybe this isn't a good place to ask, I've just been unsure about the idea and I wanted some feedback.

[EEVblog]

So I was thinking, how about a website selling... say, LEDs and their accessories? Cheap, with a low postage cost?

Do the math on profit/hour. I bet you'll You'll be working for slave labor wages.

[carbon dude oxide]

i would definitely enjoy cheaper shipping costs but saying that when you group order and your parts are over x amount most place you get free shipping, but that x amount can be quite high.

would it only be available to the uk or other country's as well?

[Spikee]

So I was thinking, how about a website selling... say, LEDs and their accessories? Cheap, with a low postage cost?

Do the math on profit/hour. I bet you'll You'll be working for slave labor wages.

When you have a good e-commerce platform and an easy and fast way to post stuff it takes very little work to earn a reasonable amount of money.
Make sure your margins are high enough! else you will be working for slave labor wages

[chrisbrown]

When you have a good e-commerce platform and an easy and fast way to post stuff it takes very little work to earn a reasonable amount of money.

This is true when your cost per item is relatively high. Someone orders a few, you pop them in a box and send it off.

Things aren't so rosy when you're dealing with order quantity variations of 1 to ten thousand. You either need to buy in bulk and package everything yourself (hope you like counting to a hundred all day long), or spend more to get prepackaged quantities, in which case you're just a zero-value-added reseller that needs razor-thin margins to compete with your supplier on ebay.

Sure, you can make some money in either case. But I think Dave's right, there's too much effort for too little payoff.

[jancumps]

It will be difficult to offer better prices than the settled players on the market. If you are getting your wares from them, it's almost impossible to get cheaper. Who else are you going to source from?
And they pop up in google queries before you.
If you're going for niche products, customers are few and far between.

Maybe if you have access to surplus stock?

[Rigby]

It can be done, but there are a few things to consider.  Sparkfun successfully did this, so there's no reason you cannot.  Adafruit did as well.

You must offer value in some way that the bigger places don't...  Shipping seems like a good way to go on that.  Another way is to create and offer your own products that are useful to the demographic you're targeting; this is what Sparkfun and Adafruit have done.  Being a simple reseller probably won't be enough.

You're going to need enough startup capital to run without income for about two years, because that's about how long it's going to take to get established.  It is very unlikely that you're going to have to go two full years without income but it will be a very short venture indeed if you have too little startup money.

You're going to have to work very long very difficult hours.  You are underestimating what I just typed there, I guarantee it.  After reading that sentence, you are still underestimating the effort required, though you believe that you are not.  Forget family, forget friends, forget video games, forget weekends, forget evenings.  Forget any scope time.  Forget any "I'll just build this real quick" time.  You're going to potentially be spending a great deal of time filling boxes and attaching shipping labels while you're answering the phone and oh shit the website is down, why isn't the dev answering his phone, oh man this is a big deal, crap i'm out of 1/4W 100 ohm resistors and Farnell has them on backorder.

Step one is to gauge interest from your targeted demographic.  Put up polls or surveys and ask folks in the UK & EU (if you're aiming for them as well) to tell you what they're looking for in a local parts distributor.  If interest is high, I say go for it.  You can do it, and it WILL be hard if you plan to succeed, but if you get through that first few years, you're golden, and the sense of accomplishment will be overwhelming.

[jancumps]

Adafruit started with an idea. The OP starts with saying he's short on ideas.

[nctnico]

So I was thinking, how about a website selling... say, LEDs and their accessories? Cheap, with a low postage cost?

Do the math on profit/hour. I bet you'll You'll be working for slave labor wages.

When you have a good e-commerce platform and an easy and fast way to post stuff it takes very little work to earn a reasonable amount of money.
Make sure your margins are high enough! else you will be working for slave labor wages

The biggest problem is keeping your webshop up-to-date with stock, prices, etc. This isn't easy at all and can become extremely time consuming.

[sleemanj]

If you actually want to make real income out of it, rather than just some pocket money to offset for your electronics habit, you may find it hard going.

If it's not a hobby then you need to have a workable net price and min orders on all your items, that or your shipping price has to be a lot higher than "the price the post office charges" do not underestimate the time it takes to package and ship items.

If somebody buys an LED for a pound, and it takes you 5 minutes - answer customer's question about "how bright is it", collect item from the cupboard, antistatic bag it, get a suitable sized shipping package, print out the address, invoice etc... then take to post office (especially if it's the only sale of the day!)... you can see how that's obviously unworkable . 

When going for the hobbiest market, selling pre-made selections of things is a good way to improve this, and people do seem to like them - example, for a while I had a lot of different types of PCB header listed for sale, with very few takers, then I changed tactic and made up packages of what I thought would be a useful selection of pcb headers, and they started selling no problem and with a much better price:effort ratio.  LEDs the same, a packaged selection of 50 leds in 5 colours is likely to sell better than just selling leds individually.

Get some high precision scales from ebay, "count" by weight not by fingers.  Your precision scales need to read down to 0.01g for led sized items but also have some larger ones for big orders (higher the precision, less the total weight a scale will handle), if ever have to deal with loose surface mount or other really small parts, you will need even higher precision (0.001g).  Add at least one piece more by weight for errors unless you have hand counted and verified at least once (even then, it's surprisingly easy to miscount multiple times and get the same answer!).

If selling SMD stuff on tape, measure don't count.  Just draw on a piece of card a line which is the length of tape you need for X pieces, pull the tape to that length, cut it with a knife and a quick check for missing pieces that fell out.

Don't forget every direct cost involved in shipping, no just the postal charge.  That anti static bag, that's about 5p, the packaging itself probably at least 20p , the return address label, the paper to print the invoice on, tape, gluestick, bubble wrap if necessary.... all adds up.  Then there is your time, electricity, fuel and wear on the vehicle you use when you take it to the post office (if you can do this 'on the way' somewhere that's great, but you don't always have somewhere to be 'on the way' to)...

Then you have the items that go missing or get damaged in the post, or are reported faulty on arrival, or are reported as short-counted on arrival, which if you value your reputation you just have to suck up and send a replacement, so need to have those losses factored in.

And if you're importing from China especially, you will from time to time get the wrong thing, broken things, things which do not meet spec, things which were shipped poorly and you don't trust them... in short, you will get stuff you can't sell at all or can't sell profitably. 

Not to mention things that you think are the ducks guts and were sure would fly off the shelves so you stupidly imported a heap of the things - only to find nobody else is interested in the slightest even when you slash the price to cost or below just to get rid of them after 6 months.

[Stonent]

You'd almost be better putting together some kind of parts kits or assortments and selling them on Ebay.  Buy small parts in 1000 quantities and put something together with parts assortments.

That might work.

[Jon86]

Wow thanks a lot, that's a heck of a lot to think about. I guess this is going to be more complicated than I thought (as always).
I was originally thinking of starting on Ebay, then moving to a website, and I might give that a go. I'm not expecting it to madly take off, just a few items here and there to make me some extra cash.
I'll be in education so I won't be able to work full time, but I guess ill just have a think, maybe put some kits/packs on Ebay and see how it goes
Thanks very much again for the advice, I won't jump into it too quickly now!

[jancumps]

...
I was originally thinking of starting on Ebay, then moving to a website, and I might give that a go. I'm not expecting it to madly take off, just a few items here and there to make me some extra cash. ...

That might work. Almost no risk or investment involved.

[sleemanj]

I'll be in education so I won't be able to work full time, but I guess ill just have a think, maybe put some kits/packs on Ebay and see how it goes
Thanks very much again for the advice, I won't jump into it too quickly now!

Head on over to aliexpress (or taobao), find some things that you can package in a way that seems saleable in your neck of the woods at a reasonable profit, and buy a modest amount of them, no need to be buying a thousand of something, it probably only shaves a few cents off the unit price anyway.

Preferably make it something you can use yourself if nobody else thinks it's worth what you need :-)

Take small steps, lots to learn along the way.

[EEVblog]

Head on over to aliexpress (or taobao), find some things that you can package in a way that seems saleable in your neck of the woods at a reasonable profit, and buy a modest amount of them, no need to be buying a thousand of something, it probably only shaves a few cents off the unit price anyway.

Yes, find something, or a range of items a bit unique and niche that nobody can easily buy in the UK and become to "go to" shop for these things. Then grow from there.
And it doesn't have to be low value items either, in fact that's a mugs game. Go for a higher value items where selling only a handful a month can still bring you a reasonable income.
Perhaps even adding some value to the existing product by bundling something with it.

[Stonent]

I was checking last night, found 200 TI Branded 555 timers for 4 cents US each, and I think 100 LM386 chips for about 5 cents US each.

All DIP packaged.  I suppose you could build some Atari Punk Consoles and sell them. Might work out well if you have an artsy music scene that appreciates sort of free form retro synth sounds.