Buying a storefront or sticking to online business?

[Amber098724]

Hi everyone,

I'm new here but you all seem pretty knowledgeable in this entrepreneur thing so I figure I'd ask you all what your opinion is.

I live in a very small town. We don't have a mall or many restaurants or anything like that. I would really like to start my own used book business. We currently don't have a bookstore in town and there is an empty storefront on one of the main streets here.

I decided to try and sell some of the stuff online to kinda gauge interest in it and it's been slow. I haven't invested in an actual domain site because I'm not sure if it'd be worth it without a steady customer base or steady traffic to my site. So right now it's just a blogspot that includes a link to my inventory.

I want to go back to loving my job and I've always wanted to own my own business. But I also don't want to be in a huge amount of debt because it failed especially if it's only because I would do it wrong.

Do you guys have any suggestions for me? Or maybe ways for me to market myself to acquire a customer base first?

[rogercbryan]

Where are you from? I own an online bookstore which sold 165,000 books last year. I'd be happy to help you. This is a tricky business as there are a lot of sunk costs that I didn't budget for when I started. I damn near lost it all getting this company going. I have some videos of my old warehouse on YouTube if you want to check them out YouTube - rogercbryan's Channel

I'll give you one piece of info now... don't bother setting up your own site to sell books. Get an account with Amazon to start. You'll grow your business much faster. I've been open for three years now and I've still sold zero books from my company site.