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The first year I am in the online business, I build two websites. But actually they were making little money. But I learned a lot from the experience. The second year, I still didn't make a lot of money. But the good thing is I was about to make my living. There are more than a lot websites on the net. But I can say, most of actually making no money. The reason is they didn't do things right.
You don't need a large space for your store. Usually 50mb is enough. Most hosting now will support php. You can use some shopping cart written in php. Usually such hosting will cost less than $10/mo.
Before you sep up your online store, one thing is proven to be good to check. You can put a few of the products on online auctions such as ebay. If you can sell on auctions, that means your product definite sells online. If you can not sell it, you may check the reason. Do the product sell for less? If that's the reason, you may need to calculate how much you can make for each item you sell.
The next step is check how the intense of the competition. To do that, you can search the keyword on google. A good keyword should come up with less than 1000,000 results. If the result is too much, that means the keyword is too competitive and it's hard to compete with so many good sites already there.
A good place to check the market is keyword suggestion tool. The most popular one is the overture suggestion tool. You type in a word and it will tell you how many searches of the word in the last month on overture. Since overture covers most popular search engines like yahoo, msn, altvista and so on, it will give you a good idea that how good the online market is for the keyword. A good market should have at least 1000 search for the keyword you typed in.
Then you need a supplier. Finding a good suppliers is important. A good place to find wholesalers is thomasregister.com. You can type the product you like and it will give the manufactures or wholesalers of the product. There will be the phone number, fax and emails of the wholesalers.