10 Low-Investment Business Ideas You Can Start Online
Starting a business can seem like a mountain of a task. But the amount of time, money, and risk involved all depends on the business idea you chase.
Contrary to popular belief, there are actually many ways to start a business that let you focus less on the logistics and upfront costs and more on getting started.
These low-investment online business ideas make a great entry point for beginners, bootstrappers, or anyone with a busy schedule, letting you pick up a side business without having to drop everything else.
You still need to come up with a solid idea, build a brand, put effort into marketing, and provide excellent customer service. But you can bypass many traditional startup costs, such as initial inventory, warehousing, and retail space.
Here are 10 of these low-investment business ideas you can start today.
10 low-investment business ideas you can start on the side
choosing a low-investment business idea
Partner with a dropshipper
Design and sell print-on-demand t-shirts
Launch your own book
Create digital products or courses
Sell print-on-demand posters, prints, etc.
Start a charitable business
Sell a service
Create an online fashion boutique
Sell handmade goods
Build an audience you can monetize
1. Partner with a dropshipperBuy stock, store it, pick it, pack it, ship it. Managing inventory can be a big commitment when you’re running an online business.
Dropshipping is a fulfillment model where a third party supplier stores and ships inventory to customers on your behalf. You just need to make the sales and pass orders on to your supplier; you don’t need to handle the products yourself.
You can curate products from one or more suppliers into your own online store under a theme that focuses on a specific niche, like gear for yoga enthusiasts or water bowls for dog owners. When a customer buys a product from you, the order is sent to your supplier who fulfills it on your behalf. However, you are still responsible for your own marketing and customer service.
There are both local and overseas suppliers you can work with, as long as you can establish a relationship with them built on trust—an unreliable supplier will reflect poorly on your brand.
Dropshipping is a low-investment way to test product-market fit and launch a business before you invest in your own original products. Just be sure to always order a sample for yourself to make sure that your supplier is reliable and that the quality of the products is fit for selling to your customers.
2. Design and sell print-on-demand t-shirtsAnother dropshipping model, print-on-demand puts inventory, shipping, and fulfillment in the hands of a third-party supplier. But unlike the dropshipping idea above, the focus here is on customizing these products with your own designs to create something original.
T-shirts, hats, phone cases, hoodies, skirts, tote bags, and more become canvases for your creativity. You can think up witty slogans for developers or references that resonate with cat owners—if there’s passion and pride within a community, there’s a potential t-shirt business you can start.
Even if you’re not a designer, you can find a designer to work with using freelance sites like Fiverr, Upwork, Dribble, or 99Designs.
With many print-on-demand services, you’re paying per-product, so the base price per unit will be more expensive than if you were to order in bulk. But the advantage is that if a certain t-shirt design doesn’t sell, you haven’t actually paid for the item yet (only the design if you outsourced it).
You can even use t-shirt mockup templates so you don’t actually need to spend money on a full photoshoot for every new design.
There are a variety of print-on-demand platforms you can work with, many of which can be integrated with your Shopify store for seamless order fulfillment. However, be sure to always order a sample of your product (often offered at a discount) to make sure your custom products look good.
t-shirt business idea
Source: ThinkPup
Additional resources:
How to Start a T-shirt Business
Think Pup T-Shirt Store [Case Study]
Printful (Shopify app)
Printify (Shopify app)
Template Icon
Shopify Academy Course: Build a Print-on-Demand Empire
Expert Shopify merchant Adrian Morrison shares his framework for starting and launching a successful print-on-demand shop.
3. Launch your own bookA book is just another type of product when you think about it. And as such, you can create one to serve a particular demand in the market.
Cookbooks, picture books, comic books, poetry books, photo books, coffee table books, and novels—if you’ve got the knowledge or the creativity, there are a variety of original books you can bring to the market.
Print-on-demand publishing is a relatively safe way to test the waters and get started with self-publishing, while giving you control over the quality and look of your book.
Lulu Xpress and Blurb are popular platforms for this purpose, letting you create, order, and distribute your own books as digital and physical products.
While you can order one book at a time, costs naturally go down when you buy in bulk. You can consider pre-selling or crowdfunding your book idea to ensure that there’s demand and guarantee a certain number of customers for a bulk order.
Launching your own book can be a great way to monetize a blog if you have one or are looking to start one.
print on demand books from lulu xpress
Examples of print-on-demand book types from Lulu Xpress
Additional resources:
How to Start a Blog That You Can Turn Into a Business
Crowdfunder (Shopify app)
Lulu Xpress (Shopify app)
4. Create digital products or coursesDigital products like music, courses, and templates are unique on this list of ideas. Unlike the others, they’re not tangible products. There aren’t recurring manufacturing or shipping costs to worry about so your margins can remain high.
The trick is figuring out what makes for a good digital product. What is useful enough that people are willing to pay to download it?
The answers range from original instrumental beats to stock photos that can be licensed to other creators, to information products and templates that help people level up their skills in a particular field.
If you’ve got a talent that can be turned into a digital product, you can think about packaging it into a new stream of income.
Shopify offers a free digital downloads app that lets you offer digital products in your store as easily as physical products.
digital products business ideas
Source: PixieFaire
Additional resources:
How to Sell Digital Products with Shopify
How an Entrepreneur from Alaska Built the Biggest Hip-Hop Drum Sample Business in the World
How to Sell Photos Online
5. Sell print-on-demand posters, greeting cards, and printsIf you’re artistically inclined or know your way around a camera, you can dropship using a print-on-demand business model to let others physically own a piece of your work. Just be sure you have the rights to the content you want to print, unless you’re using public domain assets that you can freely monetize.
If you’ve already got an engaged online following, say you’re a cartoonist or an urban photographer, you’re in an especially good position to give this business idea a try.
Depending on the printer you work with, you can turn your work into products such as posters or framed wall art, even greeting cards. There are plenty of digital templates and mockup generators like Place.it that you can use to showcase your products without having to print out each item and conduct your own photo shoots.
sell prints business idea
Source: Zen Pencils
Additional resources:
How to Sell Art Online: The Ultimate Guide
How to Sell Photos Online: For Beginner and Professional Photographers
6. Start a charitable businessStarting a non-profit organization isn’t the only path you can take to help fund a better world.
Having a mission to go along with a business, and setting aside some profit for a cause, gives social entrepreneurs a unique way to position their company in the market while addressing the issues they care about most.
In fact, 89% of consumers surveyed said they were likely to switch to a new brand with similar products and prices if it was associated with a good cause.
While many social enterprises offer their own original products, you can also take any of the business ideas above and partner with a non-profit, or execute that social good with your own hands, as long as you’re transparent about how it works.
As part of your marketing, you can share the impact that your customers are having by supporting your business, such as a blog post covering your work in the community or a real-time impact calculator on your website.
The Give & Grow Shopify app makes it easy to partner with charitable organizations and incorporate your mission into your business. You can set it up to donate a specific amount or a percentage of sales, or ask your customers to add a donation at checkout.
charitable business ideas
The Give & Grow app for Shopify lets you track and display your impact.
Additional resources:
Social Entrepreneurship: Harnessing Business to Make the World a Better Place
How This Social Entrepreneur Is Building a Better Detroit By Empowering Its Students
7. Sell a serviceWith services-based businesses, “time” is your inventory and your biggest investment. You’ve only got a limited supply of hours in your day. However, that makes it easier to get up and running if you’ve got skills that are in demand.
Writers, designers, developers, photographers, house cleaners, fitness trainers, and more can build a business around their skills.
They can also expand their business with any of the other ideas above to create additional revenue streams by “productizing” their services through physical or digital goods.
A photographer, for example, can service a local event while selling prints online through their Instagram account. A copywriter can sell a copywriting swipe file of high-converting sales copy. Coupling your service-based business with physical products can give you another source of income that isn’t directly tied to your time.
You can use the BookThatApp or Book an Appointment app for Shopify to let customers easily schedule a session, consultation, or buy tickets to a class with you through your store.
You can also offer your services through a freelance marketplace like Upwork to increase your chances of getting discovered by the people who need your skills.
sell services
The Book That App for Shopify lets customers easily book your services.
Additional resources:
12 Things to Sell on Shopify (Other than Physical Products)
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8. Create an online fashion boutiqueIf you love fashion and sharing your sense of style online, you can consider creating your own online fashion boutique. You don’t need to become a fashion designer either—you can simply curate items from other vendors into your own online store (using the dropshipping model we discussed earlier).
From dresses, shoes, swimwear, accessories, and more, you can build your own fashion brand using one of the several product sourcing apps for Shopify, model them in your own product photos and social media posts, and build an online following as a trend-setter.
fashion product sourcing app on shopify
My Online Fashion Store lets you import various styles into your Shopify store.
Additional resources:
How to Start a Fashion Line
My Online Fashion Store (Shopify app)
Modalyst (Shopify app)
9. Sell handcrafted and homemade goods
If you’re a maker—whether you DIY soap, candles, sauces, or pottery—you’re in a unique position to start an online business since product development and procurement are literally in your hands.
Unlike many of the other ideas on this list, you will need to consider shipping and inventory management, but you can start out simple on a per-order basis or with a small batch until you start generating consistent sales.
In fact, many makers on Shopify started out selling from their homes on Etsy or to friends and family, growing into full-time business owners after establishing demand for their products.
10. Grow an audience you can monetize in multiple waysIn today’s connected world, the ability to capture and keep the attention of others is an asset. It’s one that many businesses are even willing to pay for, and one that many creators are able to convert into a business with multiple revenue streams.
Whether you choose to grow your following on YouTube, Instagram, or a blog (ideally a combination of different channels), you have many avenues for monetizing your audience:
Do sponsored posts on behalf of brands
Become an affiliate
Sell physical or digital products (via any of the ideas on this list)
Patreon
A combination of the above (they’re not mutually exclusive)
Taking an audience-first approach to starting a business means you’re playing the long game (it might be months until you've figured it out). But you don't need millions followers to do it—Instagrammer Kat Gaskin, for example, pulled off a $10k product launch with only 3,000 followers.
