1. Don't BS yourself out of a golden opportunity.

There's people doing six figures a month with this stuff. But they probably lost a crazy amount of money before seeing any results. You'll probably pour in hours upon hours with no clear upside at the start. That's just how business is. But if you stick through it, your chances at success will shoot upward.

This is a relatively new industry with no large incumbents, extremely high margins, and high customer LTV's for a very sticky product.

2. Get a source.

This is relatively easy to do online. You might have to send out a lot of cold emails or calls, and you might get ghosted a lot. U.S based suppliers are generally better than Chinese (or international) ones. If you know someone in real life, that's probably the best place to get inventory from.

There's also whitelabel companies that can do all the sourcing for you, but that'll eat into your margins. It's a good place to start though.

3. Get a payment processor.

This is tougher. You can't just use Stripe or PayPal, your account will get shut down. There's plenty of high-risk payment processors out there, but be warned you'll regularly run into 7%-15% transaction fees. That's just the nature of it.

You could also do a scrappy crypto based setup, sending payments to your wallet and shipping the products when you see the payment was sent from the proper address. That avoids the fees, but customers are less likely to use crypto and it's a harder process for both sides.

4. Make a website (and your brand).

If you want to sell online you'll obviously need a website to send traffic to. The hard part of this is avoiding the complicated regulations that can get your site shut down quickly.

We can help with that. But if you don't want a fully private website we recommend Woocommerece (places like Shopify or Squarespace love suspending stores like these).

Don't overthink your branding. Just think of a name and logo that would look cool to your target audience. It should take a couple hours at most.

5. Start marketing (even in such a tough landscape).

Traditional ads are hard because of regulations. The easiest way to start is simply doing local selling. But getting started online usually requires some creativity with your marketing channels. Some people find success doing ads with very specific and compliant messaging.

The method that skips all of that hassle is starting an affiliate program. You can get content creators to send traffic to your store, at a lower cost to you with no frustrating legal hoops to jump through. We can help with that too.