i would love to start an anime shop, but a lot of japanese shops are opening up to international orders like HS or ami or like HLJ. The thing is you have to compete with these supposedly low prices. I know that shops outside japan charge a lot more mainly because of shipping, taxes, customs fee, and a markup to make profit. the ordinary buyer would see the cheaper japanese price and go for it (not thinkin of shipping prices). i see a lot of blogs advertising for these japanese shops and it seems extremely hard to compete with them since more and more people are aware of these shops. i have a few thousand US dollars to start an online anime business, but at the moment it seems risky. there are a few things that prevent one from getting the cheapest and coolest products.. it is the distribution rights to that country. i have been doing a lot of content/source researching for my blog and i noticed 90% of them don’t distribute to shops outside japan. there is also a language barrier as well since the manufacture/distributor sites are almost always in japanese with no english option (my japanese is rudimentry). many also require your business to have been established for a year or have other special rules. before i was thinking of doing anime distribution.. but im also not too sure about it. overall i want to start a business. if it fails, then it would have been fun and a good learning experience. i could always pawn the goods on ebay.

As far as costs go, assuming you already have a computer, close to $5000 is enough to get you started with a respectable amount of stock. The good thing about starting out online, is that you can get away with only having a small amount of stock on-hand until you start to grow.

If you don’t already have a job, I would recommend getting one as a startup online store isn’t going to run itself for a while. You’ll have to be its source of revenue initially until you start getting constant sales. Unless of course you have other means of funding it, but I wouldn’t recommend taking a loan out initially until you know for certain the business will be a success.

As far as the website costs go, it can really depend. You’d have to look around the net to find the cheapest or most reliable webhost, depending on your preference. There are forums out there that discuss how good certain webhosts are, so do a little research beforehand. A lot will also offer the domain with the hosting package.

I’m not sure about Canadian taxes or how Customs works over there, so you might have to check that one out yourself.

I really liked how she ran her store, which was definitely a bit different and more efficient than the other stores I’m familiar with in Australia. She had the advantage of knowing someone in Japan who would gather up a whole heap of items from the more popular series from stores in Japan and send them over every few months in a big package to save on shipping. That sounds pretty much equivalent to buying a big load from HLJ (and the fact that you can get wholesale accounts is good), but the way Ange did it meant she could get a whole pile of smaller items that many online japanese stores that ship overseas generally don’t stock (pencilboards, clearfiles, keychain trinkets, and much rarer stuff). What you said on the markup on cheaper items is definitely true, so she had a real advantage in having a large amount of smaller items that she could mark-up. As a result, she would make a killing at conventions, where those smaller items would sell really well, have a good mark-up and not obviously require domestic shipping.

If you have competitive prices, selling at local conventions can be a very quick way to make a good profit as well as advertise an online store.