I’ve been out sick for the past two weeks so I apologize if I haven’t responded to any of your emails. The fact is that I hate seeing the doctor and it was only after a week of unbearable headache pain that I finally buckled and decided to go to urgent care. It was there that I discovered that I had a bacterial sinus infection that required antibiotics to cure. If only I had known this earlier, I could have saved myself from a full week of illness. UGH!

In any case, I’ve been taking my medication for 3 days now and my head is starting to become lucid enough to resume writing. Here are a few email questions that I thought I’d answer in a blog post.

Question:
I encountered your blog last night when I did a Google search for ‘running an online …

I really hate getting nickel and dimed, especially when I believe that two items should come packaged together at no additional cost. For example, every time I go to McDonalds and order Chicken McNuggets, I get really annoyed. Back in the old days, McDonalds used to offer as many packets of sauce as you wanted for free whenever you ordered their Chicken McNuggets. But sometime within the last several years or so, they started charging you for extra sauce that exceeded their recommended quota.

Photo By Fr1zz

Now if you order 20 nuggets, you are only allocated 3 packages of sauce. For a 10 piece, you get 2 and for a 6 piece, you only get 1. For me when I order a 20 piece nuggets, I need at least 5 packets of sauce. No doubt someone at McDonalds calculated the sauce usage for the average …

A few people have emailed me lately asking questions about how much time we spend running our store on a day to day basis and I completely understand why. Running a business can be difficult and time consuming so it’s important to understand what one is getting into before taking the plunge. I even received one email from a reader who asked.

Why would I want to open an ecommerce site as opposed to something much more passive like affiliate marketing or blogging?

Passive Income?
First off, I just want to emphasize that no business is truly passive. No matter what, you have to put in a good amount of time and work upfront. In addition, there’s always some amount of effort involved to maintain your income stream once it has been established. The other thing I want to say is that if your purpose is to make …

A few weekends ago, my wife and I had the pleasure of attending the annual San Francisco Gift Fair held at the Moscone center. My mom was in town so we left the kids with her and took off to check out the latest gift wholesalers from across the US.

The SF wholesale gift show had the usual requirements to keep out casual shoppers. You needed to show at least 2 forms of id which could consist of any of the following: your business license, LLC or corporation paperwork, EIN number, business credit cards etc…

Young kids were not allowed in and you had to pay a hefty fee to bring in guests that did not have their own business. These rules were in place to make sure that only true buyers and business owners were allowed on the show floor.
Tradeshows Are A Great Place To Find Products To Sell
Tradeshows …

One of the pieces of entrepreneurial advice that I hear the most often is to start a business based on something you are passionate about. Pick a niche based on something you enjoy doing and turn it into a business.

Whenever I hear this advice, I start to roll my eyes because it’s not that simple. Sure, passion is important, but passion comes with the territory once you starting kicking butt. Passion comes naturally once you start seeing some traction and progress. The problem with picking a business idea based on what you enjoy doing during your leisure time is that you may not enjoy doing it anymore once you start charging for it.

Something fundamentally changes when you get paid and you have to cater to customers. All of a sudden, you are not acting on your own terms anymore. You must listen …