You like jewellery and you think you can sell it. Yes but on Google there are about 46,000,000 web pages under jewellery. That's a lot of competition! I believe that retail jewellery is about as close to perfect competition as you can find. In perfect competition on average you will find that businesses will only make the profit to pay back for the risk they are taking. If they can make more than this hungry new competitors will come and take that profit. That is on average. The most professional businesses will make the profit and the amateurs will take a loss.

We get 5 new potential customers a day looking to buy from us. Many of them wanting to start a home business

I run a wholesale jewellery business. If a relative of mine suggested starting an online jewellery business, I would advise them not to, and that is with the advantage of any favours I may give them.

Don't think it's easy.

You have got to find (or make) the goods to sell.

You have to take photographs. Jewellery isn't easy to photograph well. Nobody would buy jewellery from my photographs, even after buying a professional digital camera and a proper jeweller's light box. You have to produce a web-site. That's quite easy, yes. But you need a shopping cart. Which one, buy the wrong one and your jewellery looks awful.

But your photographs aren't the right size for the shopping cart, and oh they take so long to download.

How to get customers? Again easy submit your pages to Google, Yahoo etc. and the shoppers will come flooding in. Three weeks, nothing. Type in www.mynewjewelleryventure.com into Google and they haven't even listed it yet. Grrh!

Friend says you have to link to other sites to get listed quickly in Google. You send out loads of messages to high ranking websites. No response, back. You ask your friend why there was no response to your friendly letter. "Ah!" She replies, "you haven't got a Google Page Rank so you are no use to them." Talk about chickens and their eggs.

Finally Google lists you. Your friend suggests you buy advertising on Google Adwords and Yahoo Overture. It only costs 10p a click. You send off your money and people start to visit your site. One sends you an email and asks. "I like your monkey brooch it's very nice. How do I pay?" You ask for a cheque please. "But I want it for Friday" she replies, "don't you accept cards!" Your email saying that you're a new business and don't accept cards yet doesn't receive a reply.

No new enquiries from Google. Why, they still have my money! Friend suggests checking their site. Your advert for "Jewellery" has been suspended. Thanks for telling me, Google. ( Google is a very respectable search engine, you just have to know how to the system works. It would help their business greatly if they advised newbie's more what to do. )

Still no orders, you have to decide whether to pay more money to get the merchant account etc. etc. necessary to take credit card payments securely online.

Finally a cheque but to get to it you have to open the magazine-cut free the glued sheets of paper. To get the money into your bank you have to cash an Irish Grammar Schools cheque and send the goods to Nigeria. Do you?

PS We do have customers who have made a success of selling jewellery online.

PPS We didn't cash the cheque.