Now bear with me, because I'm currently in the planning stages on the products and services I'm intending to sell through my website. I've already contacted several distributors inquiring about actual sales of items from such manufacturers as Games Workshop, Wizards of the Coast, and Privateer Press. The general rule of thumb for them is that you have to have an actual retail store in order to be eligible. Presumably because there's no shortage of online stores that all sell cheaper than the actual retail locations, and many retail locations sell from their online stores to boot. Now opening and running a store is not only a massive investment of time and money, it's a rather risky business venture. Generally you want a fistful of cash in the window of $20,000 or so to get a small business loan and start up. You want more if you want to be working from anything smaller than a dumpster.

So obviously, just one individual working part time and barely breaking even on his bills like myself won't have the cash to start up the business I desire. So what I require is a change of thinking. What can I provide to the market/community that I could use to make a profit, and then put that profit towards the future of someday having a retail location? I brainstormed up a couple ideas and inquired about them around, seeing if there was any interest.

Miniatures painting. 

This isn't all that feasible an idea. There are a great many people out there who offer to sell their services painting your miniatures. If I could get enough popular interest in my website I could certainly follow through with this idea but competition would be fierce. I decided to expand on this concept a bit, and realized that I could broker multiple artists as the middleman and even offer conversions. The majority of the pay goes directly to the individual artist, but I could take a small cut for myself. Even beyond painting a given miniature, I could sell conversions too. Uniquely modified miniatures.

Custom and "Cheap" Terrain

 Many Dungeons and Dragons games are run on a 1" grid with the figurines, the Dungeon Master drawing in buildings and relevant walls or other features of interest. But popping that into three dimensions really makes the difference. There is an entire company which sells dungeon tiles. However these tiles usually come in sets of about 10 and cost more than $100. They're reusable indefinitely and relatively indestructible, but too expensive for your average gaming group. In addition Warhammer players typically have detailed terrain on their large tables. They can't use the previously mentioned tiles. I propose to create custom designed and modular terrain (with the option of having a light grid painted on) out of polystyrene foam. An inexpensive building material frequently used in terrain.

 "Stained Glass" cathedral designs

 This was a pretty idle idea. The idea is that as part of a portion of terrain, or even by themselves to sell something that looks like a stained glass window, probably in plastic as glass is a little too fragile and probably expensive to work with. I've had a couple flashes of genius on how to follow through with it. Clear resin casting might work but I absolutely need to do more research into it.

 Custom and Packaged Campaigns for various Pen and Paper RPGs.

Basically the idea is to create a campaign for Dungeon Master's game. I can imagine writing a summary of the world, detailing various factions, their interactions, having a world map, a couple city maps, and relevant dungeon maps, plus any other relevant hotspots. This idea was suggested by someone else. It seems pretty great but I can't judge how it would work in reality. There's too many variables such as RPG type and rules, the DM's skill, and the players and their intent to ruin the campaign. I could see this working really well by combining the Terrain idea, offering a package deal with uniquely pieces.