What a terrible waste of time and effort you can go through when you shop for bargains. You suffer through the ads in the newspaper. You use an Internet search engine to track down the product you want to buy. You ask friends and family for their experiences in their buying of whatever it is that you want to buy. Paper and pencil help you keep track of vendors and their prices. When you were done with all of that, did you really find the lowest prices for the product you want and need?

What makes you think that your learning experience as to buying your intended item really puts you onto a level playing field with all of those experienced vendors? These are merchants who know what you want. They know how to buy stuff to stick on their shelves. They understand pricing. They are in business to make a profit – meaning that you pay them more than what they pay to their wholesalers. If there is a merchant who is really your friend, ask "Is a nice 40% discount off of the usual retail price for something now on sale truly a good deal compared to what it actually costs you at wholesale?" If your merchant friend is really your friend, he or she will likely tell you all about the pricing theory of "keystone pricing."

That is setting the retail price of items by doubling their costs, in other words, marking up the price 100%.

So, that 40% discount from retail still leaves the merchant with a "sales price" that provides a markup from wholesale of a full 60%. (The rent, utilities, and employees must still be paid, right?)

Where does this leave you in your desire to score some hits in the bargain game?

Well, you could establish your own store on Main Street, advertise in the newspaper, on the Internet, on the radio, and so on. You could pay rent, hire employees or do everything yourself. You would want to arrange purchasing with wholesalers to stock your shelves with whatever products you want to sell. And then, you would price them, probably the keystone way, and peddle them to anyone smart enough to buy from you. One day I was listening to that funny radio show, Garrison Keillor’s "Prairie Home Companion." There were two brand spanking new merchants who had just opened their very own "Scotch Tape Store." Week Number One went by without a single customer. Now it was at the end of Week Number Two when, finally, in came their first customer. He fussed over the shelves of merchandise and, at last, he selected one roll of Scotch Tape. One of the owners yelled out, "Stockboy, Stockboy! Restock the shelf!" That was a funny skit, but all too often, that’s how things go when you own your own wood and stone retail store.

Another way to do things is to open up your store as an Internet "storefront." There are some real challenges ahead when you do that. Everything that you would face with a store on Main Street, you will also be looking at with an Internet storefront except for things such as building rent, utilities payments, and the like. However, you will need to stock your shelves with merchandise. If you want a sensible wholesale cost, your buying will be in quantity. Once you buy the items, they are yours. The wholesaler will not want them back again. Think about the total cost for 50 items, each of which comes to you for $20 at wholesale – a mere $1,000. You will want to sell the lot of them for $2,000. Now, think about Garrison Keillor’s funny Scotch Tape Store. What would your situation be if you sold only one of those items at retail for $100? You would lose $900 and there’d be no money to pay your overhead costs. How about one sale like that every two weeks? You'd be flat broke in a really great big hurry!

Let’s pretend that you wanted to operate a clothing store for motorcyclists on the Internet. Those folks come in all sizes, so you’d not only need many types of cycling attire, you’d have to stock them in a number of different sizes. Your customers will want their purchases in hand a lot faster than they’d get them if you were to accept an order from a customer, then order the item from your wholesaler, and, next, reship it to your customer. That takes too long and costs way too much due to doubling the shipping costs. Some of your suppliers might possibly offer "dropshipping" to you. If so, you would take a customer order and then ask your supplier to send their goods directly to them. Most wholesalers will not do that because they are set up to ship things in quantity and not one item at a time.

Could you buy only one item at a time from a typical wholesaler? Possibly. Maybe the correct answer is "rarely." If you could do so, the "wholesale cost" would be more like a slightly modified retail cost. That would cause your own pricing for your customers to necessarily be very high. Further to that idea, if you bought things one at a time, the cost of shipping to your store would put an outrageous burden on your own overall product cost. That is part of the wholesaling idea - ship in bulk and save lots of money. Even if the wholesale price to you were generously low for a single item acquisition, by the time that single item rolled through the door to your Internet storefront, your price to warehouse it in your storage building or in your spare bedroom would either make any profit from selling it too low or would necessitate too high a retail price, driving customers away.

Let’s go back to your proposed Internet storefront, the one from which you sell clothing for motorcyclists. Think about it for a moment. What else should you be offering motorcyclists who visit your store? How about items such as tools, motorcycle saddle bags, anti-theft locks, GPS devices, CB radios, picnic backpacks, cool-drink holders, books about motorcycles, travel books, magazine and eZine subscriptions, your own eZine, even a whole motorcycle via your affiliation with a dealer,and on and on. They may stop in for a blue suede jacket but they may also want something else, too. It costs you the same base cost to sell a customer one item or 10 items, so you should be trying for the 10 without going outside of your preferred niche. You want to become known as THE Internet storefront for motorcyclists, their go-to place when they want or need something. But you do not want to have to stock a zillion different items in a zillion different sizes and colors unless you own a large warehouse, have plenty of smart employees, and a great big corporate bank account.

I will now take a quick look at my own wholesale/retail/discount Internet storefront so as to determine what products I could offer motorcyclist customers right this minute in addition to cyclist clothing from my new niche store. Let’s call that store something like "Cycle Stuff." There should be a tag line under that store name, perhaps. "Everything a motorcyclist might ever desire." Anyway, here are some of the items I found with only the briefest of searches in the current Academy Webstore :

Weatherband portable radio, windup radio/light/alarm, binoculars, picnic backpack, regular backpack, all kinds of folding knives, biker patches, passport covers, leather wallets, motorcycle barrel bags, bag sets, saddlebags, tour bag, sports bottles, musical instruments, sporting goods, tools, watches, and umbrellas.

Had I looked longer and a little harder, I’d have probably found many more items to sell on the "Cycle Stuff" Internet store in addition to hundreds of biker clothing items. It is not only convenient for me and for my customers that all of these biker items come from the same wholesale source. Not only that, I order them dropshipped to purchasers one item at a time.

What makes "Cycle Stuff" such a nice store is that it would cater to the cyclist niche, has everything in it to get me started nicely on the road to cycling sales, and comes complete to me with ready-to-use product descriptions and very clear color photos of the products. The supplier tells me what the wholesale price is and what it costs to ship to the customer – direct from my supplier’s warehouse. When the customer pays me, I tell the supplier to ship what was ordered to the customer. I pay the supplier the wholesale price and keep my profit immediately. The whole thing works like a well-oiled machine.

Another nice thing about our new "Cycle Stuff" store is that the prices are not dictated by the wholesale supplier. The store owner sets the prices for everything offered in the store. Not only that, but the store owner can pick and choose which products are to be in the store. The owner says, "This is my store, and I will set it up and operate it the way I want it to be."

That’s all nice and handy-dandy, but I’ll have to get motorcyclists to start patronizing my new "Cycle Stuff" store. It does not take much of a genius to figure out many ways to go about doing that, does it?

I would jump onto as many motorcyclist forums as I could. There I would try to contribute to the discussions as from one cyclist to another. In my "resources box" following each contribution would be a link to me or to my "Cycle Stuff" store. But – those links should not be like advertising stuck onto the forum contributions. If what I say is valued by the readers, they will follow up on their own.

I would probably want to send relevant articles to eZines that motorcyclists attend. Because I am not a motorcyclist myself, I might cast about for some help on doing that, but, as we all here on Hubpages certainly understand, people interested in something often love to write about it. If not, it takes some research, but anyone can write about anything if they study it sufficiently. I was nicely paid for two motorcycle-related articles I wrote for Internet publication, even though I am not in the cycling crowd. One was all about "Maxi-Scooters" (which I had never before heard of…) and the other was about GPS devices for motorcycle installation which can be quickly converted to use in one’s automobile. In other words, if I can do it, so can you.

There are also more pedestrian ways to catch up to the faster-moving motorcycle crowd. Have you ever heard of E-mail? (Only kidding…) You can rent whole lists of people in this and in other fields to whom you can E-mail, or even postal mail if that is what you want to do. The whole idea is to get them to visit your Webstore. Much like when you invite someone over to your home to visit you, you will want to make them comfortable, to cause them to feel that they are special and really welcome, and to offer them things other than just the opportunity to spend their money at your place. You provide what, in Louisiana, they refer to as lagniappe – that extra gift that they really did not expect but which they welcome.

I could even peddle my wares, one at a time, on eBay, Craigslist, or the like. Yes. It is really nice to have zero facility rent and tons of options.

So, good friends and fellow writers, I have had some nice fun rambling along with this Internet store business today. The writing has been interrupted on occasion and, accordingly, may be somewhat less than nicely connected from sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph. If that does not cause you a lot of concern, believe me, I will not worry over it either.

If any of you set up your own Internet store due to my puffing about them, kindly let me know how you are doing with it. I understand that you can E-mail to me through Hubpages. If you do, I promise that I will try really hard not to withhold a very grateful answer.