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You don’t need a big budget to kickstart an ecommerce business. Check out these 26 low-cost ideas to inspire your own business venture.
Start your online business today.
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Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many ways to start a business that let you focus less on the logistics and upfront costs and more on getting your ideas started. Let’s get you past the first major mental hurdle of “I want to start a business but have no ideas.”
These 26 small business ideas make a great entry point for beginners, bootstrappers, or anyone with a busy schedule, and let you pick up a side business without having to drop everything else.
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Looking to start a business but unsure what to sell? Check out our free Big List of Business Ideas with 100+ trending products.
Whatever your business type, you will need a good domain name (use our free domain name generator) associated with an excellent brand name and a representative logo.
Buy stock, store it, pick it, pack it, ship it. Managing inventory is a big commitment when you’re running a business.
Dropshipping is an easy, low cost, business idea to start and the first of our good business ideas. Dropshipping is a fulfillment model where a third-party supplier stores and ships inventory to customers on your behalf. It’s one of the best businesses to start because it’s low overhead, hands-off, and scalable.
💡 TIP: With Shopify, it’s easy to start a dropshipping business and start selling without the hassle of managing inventory, packaging, or shipping. Orders are sent directly from your wholesaler to your customers, so you can work on what matters—your products, marketing, and customers.
You don’t need to handle any products yourself—you just need to make the sales and pass orders on to your supplier. In fact, it’s one of the quickest and cheapest businesses to start.
You can curate products from one or more suppliers into your own online store under a theme that focuses on a specific niche, like gear for yoga enthusiasts or water bowls for dog owners. When a customer buys a product from you, the order is sent to your supplier, who fulfills it on your behalf. However, you are still responsible for your own marketing and customer service.
There are both local and overseas suppliers you can work with, as long as you can establish a relationship with them built on trust—an unreliable supplier will reflect poorly on your brand.
Dropshipping is a great way to test product-market fit and launch a business before you invest in your own original products. Just be sure to always order a sample for yourself to make sure your supplier is reliable and that the quality of the products is fit for selling to your customers.
Learn more:
Another dropshipping model, print on demand puts inventory, shipping, and fulfillment in the hands of a third-party supplier. But unlike the dropshipping business idea above, the focus here is on customizing products with your own designs to create something original.
T-shirts, hats, phone cases, hoodies, skirts, tote bags, and more become canvases for your creativity. You can think up witty slogans for developers or references that resonate with cat owners—if there’s passion and pride within a community, there’s a potential t-shirt business you can start.
Even if you’re not a designer, you can find one to work with using freelance sites like Fiverr, Upwork, Dribbble, or 99Designs.
With many print-on-demand services, you’re paying per product, so the base price per unit will be more expensive than if you were to order in bulk. But the advantage is that if a certain t-shirt design doesn’t sell, you haven’t actually paid for the item yet (only the design, if you outsourced it).
You can even use t-shirt mockup templates so you don’t need to spend extra money on a full photoshoot for every new design.
There are a variety of print-on-demand platforms you can work with, many of which can be integrated with your Shopify store for seamless order fulfillment. However, be sure to always order a sample of your product (often offered at a discount) to make sure your custom products look good.
Via Vapor95
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A book is just another type of product when you think about it. As such, you can create one to serve a particular demand in the market.
Cookbooks, picture books, comic books, poetry books, photo books, coffee table books, and novels—if you’ve got the knowledge or creativity, there are a variety of original books you can bring to the market. The options are endless—that’s why it’s one of the best small business ideas to start.
Print-on-demand is a relatively safe way to test the waters and get started with self-publishing. It also gives you control over the quality and look of your book.
Lulu xPress and Blurb are popular platforms to create, order, and distribute your own books as physical and digital products. You could also sell it on third-party marketplaces like Amazon or Powell’s.
While you can order one book at a time, costs naturally go down when you buy in bulk. Consider pre-selling or crowdfunding your book idea to ensure there’s demand and guarantee a certain number of sales so you can feel confident making a bulk order.
Launching your own book can be a great way to monetize a blog if you have or are looking to start one.
Learn more:
Digital products like music, courses, podcasts, and templates are unique on this list of low-investment small-business ideas. Unlike the others, they’re not tangible. There aren’t recurring manufacturing or shipping costs to worry about, so your margins can remain high, making it another no-brainer for being one of the best businesses to start.
The trick is figuring out what makes for a good digital product. What is useful enough that people are willing to pay to download it?
The answers range from original instrumental beats to stock photos that can be licensed to other creators to information products and templates that help people level up their skill sets in a particular field.
If you’ve got a talent that can be turned into a digital product, think about packaging it into a new stream of income.
Shopify has a free Digital Downloads app that lets you offer digital products in your store as easily as physical products.
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If you’re artistically inclined or know your way around a camera, you can dropship using a print-on-demand business model to let others physically own a piece of your work. Just be sure you have the rights to the content you want to print or are using public domain assets you can freely monetize.
If you’ve already got an engaged online following—say you’re a cartoonist or an urban photographer—you’re in an especially good position to give this small business idea a try.
Depending on the printer you work with, you can turn your work into products such as posters or framed wall art, even greeting cards. There are plenty of low-cost digital templates and mockup generators like Placeit you can use to showcase your products without having to print out each item and conduct your own photo shoots.
Via Baltic Club
Learn more: How to Sell Art Online: The Ultimate Guide
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How to quickly start a profitable print-on-demand store
In our free 40-minute video workshop, we’ll get you from product idea to setting up an online store to getting your first print-on-demand sale.
Starting a non-profit organization isn’t the only path you can take to help fund a better world.
Having a mission to go along with a business and setting aside some profit for a cause gives social entrepreneurs a unique way to position their company in the market while addressing the issues they care about most.
While many social enterprises offer their own original products, you can also take any of the low-cost small-business ideas above and partner with a non-profit or execute that social good with your own hands, as long as you’re transparent about how it works.
As part of your marketing, you can share the impact that your customers are having by supporting your business, such as a blog post covering your work in the community or a real-time impact calculator on your website.
The Give & Grow Shopify app makes it easy to partner with charitable organizations and incorporate your mission into your business. You can set it up to donate a specific amount or a percentage of sales, or ask your customers to add a donation at checkout.
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Offering services isn’t passive, but it certainly can be a lucrative way to gain self-employment. With services-based small business ideas, “time” is your inventory and your biggest investment. You’ve only got a limited supply of hours in your day. However, that makes it easier to get up and running if you’ve got skills that are in demand.
Writers, graphic designers, virtual assistants, SEO practitioners, cleaning service providers, dog walkers, real estate professionals, and more can build a business around their skills. You could offer these skills as an ongoing service or start a consulting business that advises on projects.
It’s one of the best business opportunities because it can be expanded with any of the other ideas above to create additional revenue streams by “productizing” services through physical or digital goods.
A photographer, for example, can service a local event while selling prints online through their Instagram account. A freelance writer can sell a copywriting swipe file of high-converting sales copy. Coupling your service-based business with physical products can give you another source of income that isn’t tied directly to your time.
You can use the BookThatApp or Acerill Appointment Booking for Shopify to let customers easily schedule a session or consultation or buy tickets to a class with you through your store.
You can also offer your services through a freelance marketplace like Upwork to increase your chances of getting discovered by the people who need your skills.
Learn more:
If you love fashion and sharing your sense of style online, you can consider creating your own online fashion boutique. You don’t need to become a fashion designer—you can simply curate items from other vendors into your own online store (using the dropshipping model we discussed earlier).
🏁 GET STARTED: Shopify has everything you need to bring your business to life and start selling. Get the tools and free resources you need to build, launch, and grow your business all in one place.
Dresses, shoes, swimwear, accessories, and more—you can build your own fashion brand using one of several product-sourcing apps, model them on your own with product photos and social media posts, and build an online following as a trendsetter. Apps like MyOnlineFashionStore let you import various styles into your Shopify store.
Learn more:
If you’re a maker—whether you DIY soap, candles, sauces, or pottery—you’re in a unique position to find a small business idea, because product development and procurement are literally in your hands.
Unlike many of the other ideas on this list, you will need to consider shipping and inventory management, but you can start out simple on a per-order basis or with a small batch until you start generating consistent sales.
In fact, many makers on Shopify started out with a home business idea, selling on Etsy or eBay, or to friends and family through word of mouth, and grew into full-time small-business owners after establishing demand for their products.
Just be mindful of any regulations in your product category, especially for anything customers will eat, inhale, or put on their skin.
Brooklyn Candle Studio is one of many maker-owned businesses on Shopify that started on Etsy.
And Arounna Khounnoraj and John Booth are a couple who have been operating bookhou, an online and physical shop selling handmade goods and functional bags.
Learn more:
In today’s connected world, the ability to capture and keep the attention of others is an asset. It’s one that many businesses are even willing to pay for and one that many creators are able to convert into a business with multiple revenue streams.
Whether you choose to grow your following on YouTube, Instagram, or a blog (ideally a combination of different channels), you have many avenues for monetizing your audience:
Taking an audience-first approach to your small business idea means you’re playing the long game (it might be months until you’ve figured it out). But you don’t need millions of followers to do it—Instagrammer Kat Gaskin, for example, pulled off a $10,000 product launch with only 3,000 followers for her brand, The Content Planner.
Learn more:
The pet industry is ripe with opportunity for all kinds of small-business ideas. Your pet business could be product- or service-based—selling accessories, food, or toys, or offering grooming, walking, or training expertise.
Perkie Prints makes personalized printed pet products—everything from apparel to framed prints, plus fun projects in between.
On the service side of things, Let the Dog Out offers dog walking and “bathroom breaks” to its customers.
Online memberships are ideal for entrepreneurs with an established active and engaged community. They work much like a subscription-based business—customers make recurring payments in exchange for a virtual product or service.
Memberships are great for managing members-only access to content on a website, and even for physical businesses that offer guided sessions online. Yoga studios, gyms, clubs, and art schools are a few examples of businesses that can easily take advantage of this business model.
Since this content is behind a gate that only paying subscribers can access, you can also host exclusive livestreams in addition to (or instead of) downloadable content.
Regardless of the route you take, be sure to record in a quiet space so the audio is clear and distraction free.
It’s also a good idea to use email marketing to keep your members informed of new content. Emails, video teasers, and customer testimonials are great ways to build excitement for new launches.
And it’s easy to start your membership-based business with Shopify. Set up a new product just like you would for a physical product, but create a name and description that tells people about your membership services.
Make sure to unselect “This is a physical product” to remove shipping options at checkout. (Note: Some of the setup required might change depending on which apps you choose to use later in the process.)
If you want to offer different options for your memberships, create variants. You can set different prices for each option and limit the number of times available, if needed, by editing each option.
Affiliate marketing refers to a performance-based marketing tactic where a business pays people, a.k.a. affiliates, to promote and sell products for them. Every time an affiliate brings in a new customer, they receive a commission from the business.
Affiliates can promote products on their blogs, social media accounts, or websites, or in communities. For many, affiliate marketing is a low-cost side hustle that turns into a profitable business over time.
To join an affiliate program, take the following steps:
Commission rates vary, depending on the company and offer. You could earn as low as 5% for each sale, while some commissions can be as high as 50% if you’re promoting a class or event. Some affiliate programs also offer a flat rate versus a percentage.
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Virtual event planning is a profitable business idea if you enjoy organizing and connecting people. Growing at 23% per year, the significant rise in business events and adoption of virtual tools for conducting meetings will keep this market growth high. As a virtual event planner, you’ll be responsible for creating virtual conferences, networking opportunities, and educational sessions for companies around the world.
Facebook’s move into the metaverse will open up new opportunities for event planners in the near future. Party.Space, for example, has raised capital to scale up its metaverse-themed virtual events business. If you want job security for the future, virtual event planning is a good way to go.
Got a love for nature and outdoor design? A landscaping business is a great option for you. Landscaping, also referred to as lawn care, means modifying and maintaining the visible features of an area of land. You’re responsible for creating beauty out of natural, living elements like flowers, grass, and trees.
There’s growing demand for residential outdoor landscape maintenance in younger households across the world. Competition in the market is moderate. You’ll face a few leading landscaping companies like TruGreen, as well as smaller local service providers.
Creating a million-dollar app or your own business is not easy. In fact, 99.5% of consumer apps fail. Most apps don’t have product-market fit. They need a ton of marketing, and they’re expensive to create.
So, why bother putting this on our small-business ideas list? Because consumer app development isn’t the only path for entrepreneurs. New apps for the Shopify App Store crop up daily, with a market of motivated businesses eager to find the tools they need.
Sound interesting? Check out How to Build a Shopify App: The Complete Guide on our Partners blog to learn more.
The rise in demand for child care services with a decreasing supply is a perfect mixture for starting a new business. If you enjoy taking care of kids and can get the proper licenses, a new child care business could be a good business idea for you.
Explore: Top 24 Achievable Business Ideas for Kids
Selling coffee can be profitable with a strong brand and the right marketing plan. Sure, coffee has a lot of competition. But that shouldn’t scare you away from this multibillion-dollar industry. Selling a high-commodity product like coffee has many benefits:
Because coffee is so widely available, it’s easier to sell. People already want coffee, you just need to make them want your coffee.
Learn more: Sell Coffee from Home: What Does it Take to Launch an Online Café?.
I grew up with a dad who was a handyman, always fixing things around the house: a plumbing issue, installing tile, cleaning out gutters, putting up a fence. He was always the guy friends and family would call on for odd jobs around the house. If only the internet has been popular in those days, he could have built his own business website and offered his services locally!
Whether it’s fixing a boiler or building a patio deck, if you’re a handyman who likes to fix things, this could be a lucrative business for you.
Got a passion for taking photos? Turn your hobby into a full-time photography business. Today, you don’t just have to sell services for weddings and corporate ad campaigns. You can easily set up a store and sell prints, posters, NFTs, and more. Or you can sell your photos on stock photography sites.
Between YouTube, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and all the other social networks available—brands need help managing their accounts.
A social media manager is responsible for creating and analyzing content for brands’ social accounts. Clients will pay you to create engaging content, write attractive bios, respond to comments, run ads, and more. You could charge by the hour or by project rate.
The beauty industry really pulled through the pandemic and the momentum continues to build. Our research shows that 55% of health and beauty business founders reported being satisfied with business performance throughout the pandemic and beyond. Businesses that sell online and offer different delivery services will continue to win.
Some product ideas with high demand are:
Learn more: How to Launch a Makeup Brand and Sell Online: The Ultimate Guide.
As travel increases, so does the need for home and pet care while people are away. And with the increase in remote work, long-term holidays are becoming more commonplace—so while you might be able to leave your home unoccupied for a weekend, a month-long trip may require some more care.
Housesitting and pet sitting are good business ideas to start if you feel comfortable caring for and staying in a stranger’s home, potentially with their pets.
You can create your own website on Shopify to market and sell your services, and there are also dedicated home and pet care websites and apps you can use. Here are some examples:
Note, some pet sitters offer on-site services while others care for pets in their own homes. You can even add a dog walking business element to appeal to a wider range of people. Regardless of your choice, it’s important to communicate this upfront.
If you want to try these successful business ideas, it’s always important to invest time into creating a great profile. Choose pictures that show you happy and smiling—ideally with animals (be sure to get permission from the pet owners first). Fill out every section of your profile so it’s complete. Be specific about your history caring for homes and pets, and remember to include any specific qualifications or certifications that may give you a leg up against another potential sitter.
Ultimately, the best plan of attack for these new business ideas is to use a combination of your own Shopify site and third-party platforms.
Because so many people own mobile phones now, there’s a huge market for phone accessories. And there are many different ways you can go with these accessories—print on demand, handmade, niche by product type, dropshipping, and more.
Some ideas for phone accessories to sell include:
When listing your phone accessories for sale, remember to include which devices they’re compatible with. You don’t want to create a negative yet avoidable experience for customers who receive an item they can’t even use.
Learn more: How to Start a Phone Case Business From Home, Step by Step
If you’re not interested in creating your own products to sell, you can curate them. One of the best small-business ideas is to sell subscription boxes with curated products that follow a certain theme.
One of the great parts about subscription boxes is you can create them for pretty much every single niche out there. For example, featuring merchants and makers in your community is one of the best local business ideas for subscription boxes. You can also go for themes like yoga, beer brewing, or pets—the possibilities are pretty much limitless.
Like memberships, subscriptions are good business ideas to start because they create a recurring revenue stream. People have to proactively cancel their subscription if they don’t want to continue paying for it.
Subscriptions also lend themselves to collaboration. When you curate products from different merchants, you can get in front of their audiences—a whole group of potential new subscribers.
Learn more: How to Start a Subscription Business: A Brief Guide
Here’s a unique business idea: vending machines. Yes, there’s money to be made with vending machines. Though the industry took a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, projections indicate vending machines will bounce back.
Some of the reasons for decline include decreased foot traffic—fewer people shopping, traveling, and going to work—and hygiene-related hesitations around touching surfaces. So if you’re opting to go this route, you may want to take a forward-thinking approach and look for vending machines that offer touchless options.
The key to making this a successful business idea is to offer the right products at the right location. Do your research to find high-trafficked areas and understand exactly who is walking by and what they might need at that moment. With a strategic approach, vending machines can be a profitable business idea with small investment and an overall great business idea.
The small business ideas we’ve covered might be easier to run when it comes to logistics, but that doesn’t make them easy. There are at least three things you should keep in mind as you consider your options, no matter what business you decide to start.
As with any business, marketing is what unlocks your success. It’s not enough to know that there’s demand for your products—you need to figure out ways to reach the people that are most likely to buy them, i.e., figure out your target market. You need to get the right visitors to discover your products.
Luckily, marketing is a lot easier when you’re catering to a specific target audience or identity (e.g., vegans, board game lovers, photographers in your city). You can produce social media content that resonates with these people or run ads that target their interests. Taking this approach also helps you project a consistent brand because you’ll have a more specific idea of who exactly you’re talking to.
Think about how you can zero in on a specific audience for your products and how the business you build can serve them. If you already have a sizable audience (a blog, a YouTube channel, or an Instagram account), maybe you can even find a way to base your business off of that existing audience.
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Price your products too low and shoppers might assume they’re low quality. Price them too high and you risk scaring some customers off. In any case, you’ll need to find a sweet spot that also lets you factor in the cost to acquire customers and offer discounts, especially if you plan on paying for ads. Getting your pricing right is something most business owners struggle with. To calculator your possible profit based on product prices you can use our free profit margin calculator.
With many of the small business ideas explored in this post, you may not be shipping your products, but you still need to cover the cost of shipping. Consider your shipping costs and how they will vary in the different countries you want to serve.
Many online sellers try to bake their shipping costs into their retail price so they can offer free shipping or at least a reasonable flat rate. Others focus on encouraging shoppers to add more items to their cart with conditional free shipping (e.g., free shipping on orders over $50) to maximize their profit.
At the end of the day, your prices can be tweaked and you can experiment with a variety of pricing strategies until you find one that works for you.
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The pursuit of perfection can be one of the biggest hurdles in getting a business up and running. Keep in mind that nothing is set in stone.
Products can be swapped in and out fairly easily (especially when you’re not stuck with stock). Your store can be redesigned. Your prices can be adjusted. You can switch to a better supplier. And you can validate all of these decisions based on the dozens of signals you have at your disposal (traffic, how much time people are spending on your site, reviews, abandoned carts, etc.).
If your idea just isn’t working out the way you planned, think about how you can pivot before you quit.
>There are aspects of your own business you can always salvage if you try a different product or approach. The brand you invest time into creating and the followers you amass on social media or in your email list can be assets you repurpose for your next business idea.
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To start a business you need more than just a dream. To put the wheels in motion, you’ll need to:
There are many ways to come up with good business ideas of your own. You or someone you know might have a poor personal experience with a company—and you know you can do better. Or maybe there’s a complete gap in the market: for example, demand for a specific product but no one meeting it. Other ideas come from everyday moments, in the shower or right before you fall asleep.
If you’re feeling stuck on good business ideas or want to come up with more, there are a few ways to brainstorm even further. Write down all your ideas. Keep a brainstorming board, be it tactile or digital, and plaster your ideas there whenever they come to mind. Then revisit it with fresh eyes.
There’s power in numbers, too. Recruit help from colleagues or friends and family to brainstorm new ideas. Survey your existing customer base or audiences and get their ideas. Look at what people are saying on social media or searching online. Start with lots of ideas and then refine your list to the top ideas to explore further.
Thanks to a combination of technology, third-party suppliers, and the ability to quickly test ideas online, it’s easier than ever to build a successful business and start making sales without getting caught up in sourcing products, renting space, and managing inventory.
With this approach, you can test ideas before you invest in them, or start making good money part-time without all the inventory-related commitments that might stand in your way.
The small-business ideas covered above can even be combined in a variety of ways to start a business that’s uniquely yours. If the idea of sourcing, storing, and shipping inventory kept you from starting a business before, begin with an inventory-free, low-cost business model and grow from there. Use this list of online business ideas to get the creative juices flowing.
The world of self-employment can be challenging, but with a little hard work and know-how, you can work towards building your own business.
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The easiest businesses to start would be anything online: dropshipping stores, online courses, tutoring, fashion stores, or selling services. Online businesses require minimal startup costs and can easily scale, so you can earn more profit and do less work over time.
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