We’re getting into territory where you’ll need more skills, time, and patience. You’ll also need your laptop for most of these intermediate level ideas:
Dropshipping is a reasonably new way of selling products online. It’s when you take orders from customers - through your website, for example - and another company fulfils that order. You’re not making the products yourself, or having to put in stock orders and then hold that stock until somebody buys it.
For example, say you want to dropship car accessories - like seat covers. Rather than put an order in for 1,000 seat covers and then have to find 1,000 customers to buy them, you can dropship them. You list the seat covers on a website you’ve set up. You take the order, and send it to the manufacturer, who sends the seat cover to your customer. You charge the customer £10. The manufacturer charges you £5 for the product and £1 for delivery. You pocket £4!
It’s not quite as easy as it sounds. The manufacturer will supply that same seat cover to other dropshippers - so you’ll need to find a way to stand out. So think about what you want to sell - and who to. Then get on the search engines - you’ll find plenty of manufacturers who dropship, as well as tips to stand out in your niche.
Etsy is aimed at crafty types - but you can sell all sorts. For example, you could pay a graphic designer to create a cool t-shirt design, then sell the t-shirts on Etsy for a profit. You don’t even need to invest in tonnes of stock. Once you have your design, you can use print-on-demand services. It’s a similar principle to dropshipping, but takes it one step further - the merchandise doesn’t physically exist until somebody orders it. So when somebody orders your t-shirt design, you send the order to the print house. They print it up and ship it to your customer, and you make a tidy profit. Keep your costs down by sticking to basic black or white t-shirts and you can easily make a £5 to £10 profit per t-shirt.
Selling on Etsy? Read this
Sites like Upwork can be great places to pick up small jobs if you have skills like graphic design, or can write, for example. But there are also loads of simple jobs advertised - like collating spreadsheets - that don’t require pro-level skills.
Sites like Fiverr are a similar deal. You advertise your skills, people pay for them. It’s less professional than the likes of Upwork. While there are professionals selling their digital skills, there’s also quite a lot of…plain weird stuff up for grabs on Fiverr. Anything you could dream of asking somebody to do on camera, for example - there’s almost certainly somebody on Fiverr willing to do it for money. The point is, if there’s an odd digital skills niche you think you can fill, Fiverr could be the place for you. And while basic skills and products go for $5, hence the name, there’s no limit to what you can upsell people on. That’s how some users have apparently made six-figure sums through the platform.
