These 6 eCommerce Businesses Coulda Been Started with Under $20 and Have Made Hundreds of Thousands

I recently ordered a novelty product for my girlfriends brother. It was an incredibly stupid product. The all in cost to make it and ship it had to be under $5 and I paid about $30 for it. The site selling it is making 5x their money on each unit sold. The craziest part is there really isn't even any inventory required to run this business. Everything could be picked up as needed at a local hobby or craft store.

This got me thinking of some other "stupid businesses" that have actually been very profitable. The most obvious one that comes to mind is a business called "I want to draw a cat for you". Those of you out there who are Shark Tank fans probably have seen this guy on Shark Tank, and if I remember correctly Steve even got a deal with Mark. This business required nothing more than a pen and paper to start. Startup costs...literally zero dollars, only postage.

A couple other novelty businesses that came to mind are the potatoes and eggplants through the mail with funny messages written on them. If you wanted to start a business like this you could literally setup a Shopify store on a free trial for zero dollars. Heck you don't even have to buy the potatoe or eggplant until you get your first sale and all you need is a sharpie to write a message on it. You could literally wait til you got your first sale, go and buy a potatoe, write the message on it and chaching your in business.

I know for a fact this potatoe business has made over $300,000.

Now obviously these aren't going to be long running busineses, and they likely won't be making millions of Dollars. My point however being if you can start some kind of creative outside the box idea like this for next to nothing, it could wind up being successful and making you some money, and then you can use that money to parlay into your next thing, your next bigger idea.

I guess my point is this. Get creative, think outside the box, don't be scared to do something that not everyone else is doing. I see so many people running into areas like print on demand tee shirts trying to sell $30 tank tops along with 10,000 other people trying to do the same thing. I see hundreds of people all trying to dropship tree hammocks from Ali Express.

Rather than trying to do the same thing as a million other people and competing with all these other people open up your mind, great creative and try to do something different. You just may come up with the next potatoe parcel.