What is possible, on a low budget?

Wholesale items from China is actually one of the best methods. I bought 500,000 BIC disposable lighters (multi colors and designs) for $42,500, I then turned around and sold those to local stores in smaller batches, and batches of 1,000 on ebay for around $150,000 total after 2 weeks. So that's $108,000 profit off a 2 week investment, it can obviously take a month or more to unload them, but it's a decent method.

Originally buying around $0.085 a BIC, and re-selling $0.30 a BIC; stores sell them $1.

 

What are the shipping costs on BIC containers? That sounds like a decent enough method? I'm assuming you will have to have a fair amount of start up and contacts for this to work?

 

If this is true, wasn't you worried about China scamming you.

 

What site is it best to buy wholesale from?

 

Alibaba and tradekey, you research the suppliers, after safely buying from them, you could then make arrangements with them to do it directly for even cheaper. You do have to be careful when buying wholesale like that. Making your own dropship group is decent profit too.

 

Yeah dropshipping can be massively profitable.

 

If you're setting up an e-commerce site, you need a dropshipper, not a wholesaler. If you choose to go into the laptop niche, what are you going to do? Stock up on every single laptop you have listed and hope to God someone buys them all?

The best opensource e-commerce software requires some pretty extensive coding knowledge in order to have a custom set up.

Perhaps, if you had the money to purchase spare sites and set them up to test your methods on.

True, but I'm assuming what the OP here is asking for is to create a long-term business. If you're just looking to flip a few quick bucks then that's a different matter altogether.

 

I think you really want to go in to that sort of stuff, its really time consuming
and I ended up dropping it 2 months in. Left college with pretty good results to
be fair.