Selling Model Trains Online

Being ditched by my brother after spending almost two years working on what was supposed to be a joint deal took me back to ground zero. Besides being cut out of a business that had significant potential, I was left with no website, no established link network or traffic avenues. I didn't want to start a business that would directly compete with my brother's, so I didn't even have a product to sell at that point.

The next step was for me to figure out what I wanted to sell. Making a decision regarding what you're going to sell online is a major step when creating a successful ecommerce business. It's like walking down a road and coming to a place with a thousand different forks. Your decision regarding what product you are going to sell will have obvious impact on your business for years to come. You can read my article about what factors to consider when you're ready to seriously make that decision. Simply put, it's best to anticipate as best you can your sales process and focus on something that will be as simple and profitable as possible. It also helps if you sell something you enjoy.

Soon after my split from OuterSports.com, my wife got a job at a business that sold electronics and other toys online. She was impressed with the growth the company had experienced over the previous few years with their business. Partly because of her experience at work, our discussion about what we should sell online tended to focus on finding a niche that we could potentially dominate. My wife's grandfather was a model train enthusiast. On our most recent visit to his home in Texas, he showed us his elaborate train setup. With the influence from my wife's grandpa and her job, we made a decision to begin selling model train sets and later add other related products.

We got some literature on model trains so we could learn what we needed to sell model trains confidently and provide quality customer support. We learned about O-Scale, S-Scale, and HO-Scale trains. We studied some of the various aspects of what's involved in setting up train tracks, train stations, and accessories. We bought a domain, BigKidsPlayground.com, and we started to build our site.

As we began building a network of suppliers for model train sets, it soon became apparent to us that an online store selling model trains and accessories could quickly become more than we wanted to handle. The wholesale accounts we set up provided us with price lists that didn't show a very impressive margin on most of their products. We thought about the difficulties that could arise with customers buying trains and having difficulty with them not working for one reason or another. Electronics are often volatile products, and the nature of the detail with model trains, tracks, and scenery gives them a higher level of potential problems.

Despite the significant amount of time it took us to "settle" on the idea of selling model trains online, and the efforts we put into starting down that road, we backed out.

I tell this story because it illustrates what I mentioned about finding a product to sell that is relatively simple, and which a person can make a decent profit from. I'm definitely not saying that there's no way to make a profit selling model trains online. Had we continued down that road, we could likely have made it work. It's just that, using our best judgment and intuition, we figured our time would be better spent building a store that we estimated to have more potential.