Successful Online Stores?

They made $2mm per year?
 

Thats 100x what I got paid during my internship

I highly suggest going through reviews of reviews. Now there are contents like 'I tried amazon FBA for 1 month". They review courses offered by famous, trial of many platforms and finally net income. This will give you the best income based on your region. As there are certain platforms which are zone specific.

Malaysia has a few successful online stores. The one that is currently overtaking other competitors is shopee. It has more shipping and payment options. Not just that, it also offers products across all ranges at cheaper rates compared to its competitor. It has  many games for users to earn coins that can be redeemed later with purchases.

$2 million in revenue sounds nice as a fun milestone, but it isn't much more than that. You're not taking home a meaningful salary at that point and your equity value doesn't mean much as you're not big enough to be acquired by anyone aside from an ecomm aggregator. Take it from somebody who knows this space well.

Fulfillment costs for a typical DTC/eComm company that hasn't yet reached economies of scale will decimate margin unless these costs are very, very closely managed by somebody who knows what they're doing. This is especially true for anyone shipping a dense product (e.g. wine, spirits, any liquids). It is relatively easy to start an online consumer products company, but it is very difficult to scale and operate said company to an outcome that'd be remotely interesting to most investors and operators. Unlike some other business models that are more VC-fundable, if you can't rapidly establish PMF and sustinable margins in consumer you're dead in the water before you know it. You simply can't iterate as rapidly and meaningfully as other businesses like software. You have to nail it.

This doesn't really answer your question, but hopefully provides some perspective. To print money at a small scale you ultimately need to push your margins as high as you possibly can. This is the primary discussion point in nearly 90% of conversations with companies in this space. Don't convince yourself that you can just benefit from scale at some nebulous future date. It wont happen.

The successful ones have few things in common:
1) Their product can't be sourced by anyone

2) They build conviction into their customer( warranty/certificate of authority from local body or popular body)
3) Good review (not only five star but people stating or comparing with previous)
Some are also adult oriented like used underwear (1,3), OF,sugarbook(1,2,3) and Hired companion (2)

alibaba, shopify, sugarbook, OF, TNA, shopee, lazada, agoda, trivago &etc

ok, so a few of my friends were laid off during the pandemic and never found another job. They jumped onto etsy, ebay, and others and started producing products which sell hundreds of times per day. It started slower, but some were really strong during the pandemic as well:
- toys for the bedroom (yes, those); very profitable niche, especially given the WFH and OF hype. People have more time for pillow talk in recent years and this seems to work
- signs, labels, large prints; this is a very competitive field, but still someone that could work with the right story behind it
- special events and design services; some people design products for specific events like religious events, ceremonies and more. If you order more than just a random product you can charge more.