On Jan 5, 2007, at 3:43 PM, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

>> Glitchbuster charged "$1.95 shipping on most orders."
>
> Can I comment from my experience as a small online shop?
>
> If you run an online shop for a living you must get your profit,
> one way or the other. Otherwise you can't pay the mortage, and/or
> your wife will tell you to get a job, so either way you must close
> down the shop.

Well, and thus glitchbuster is out of business :-(  My impression
was that he wasn't running the shop "for a living" so much as for
"chip money" and perhaps to bump himself up to the next tier of
pricing from his suppliers.

It was nice to have a site where you could get a couple PICs
delivered, with appropriate glue bits for less than $10, but as
you say, I doubt it was a viable business...

I wonder if it would be practical/profitable for one of the bigger
"for-profit" vendors to offer a limited "starter kit" that would sell
for less than $10 and include the most commmon parts.  The idea would
be to limit some of the overhead of ... overhead by only offering a
single such kit, which could be pre-packaged and just dropped in the
mail as it was ordered...

BillW
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