Electronic Cigarettes (‘e Cigs’)

WOW what potential this area has!!  The FDA wants their mitts on this but it just isn’t panning out like that!!

I hesitated to mention this several weeks back, upon realization of the implications of this market, because i had every intention of getting into distribution myself (or production, as I have some novel engineering ideas for these little gizmos!), but at this point I think i’d rather be an unofficial lobbyist/sales rep for the industry than sell them (you cannot really do both… see, these items cannot, in any way/shape/form, be sold in the US as having anything to do with smoking cessation.  Our country keeps the Nicorette Inhalers as a precription-only item, but the electronic cig / ecig / personal vaporizor movement is negating the FDA’s “nicotine replacement therapy inhaler” medical device product-class.  You cannot really endorse these things as they deserve and sell them, or you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.  I’d rather evangelize, because these things truly have the potential/likelihood to be a health revolution of sorts (and will likely devastate big tobacco)

Would love to hear ppl’s thoughts on this stuff, i mean even for ppl who don’t personally have smoking-demons or have ppl close to them w/ such problems, these products are just bad-ass delivery systems in general (most are unaware that nicotine itself is both ergogenic and, in terms of safety, on-par with caffeine.  Burning/combusting tobacco, to get nicotine, is quite obviously terrible for you.  Consuming a safe dose of pure nicotine is completely fine (whether a patch, gum or inhaled vapors), and is actually an ergogenic)

Right now most gas stations have $7-10 disposable units (that you can get for $3/unit if buying by the thousands), and most of the refillable kits are on the order of 30-100$ (at which point the person spends half what they would have on cigarettes).

I have to say i’m very shocked that Blu or Njoy, two industry leaders, aren’t trying to expand too aggressively (although njoy did run television ads of people vaping, and while the FDA tried to stop this under the pretense of ‘no cigarette ads’, the courts didn’t agree with them ;P

Online Store? Selling Goods Before One Can Buy Product To Stock?

So a friend/former client was selling peptides and reasearch chemicals online and in the past few months got out of the business. I did a lot of his tech/backend stuff including his mailing list.

I have 12,396 U.S. customers (I’m in the U.S.) that were/are on that mailing list. I lack the funds for actually purchasing products of any variety to sell online, be it supplements to cell phone cases to zebra themed xylophones. I do however have the email list that I can use to say “Hey, ABC is gone but now there is XYZ, check us out you might like what you see”.

Only option I see to benefit from this would be pre-packaged drop-shipped stuff in the beginning, if I went a nutrition/supplement path it would mean 12k customers that I know are already interested in that type of stuff. If it was something else, I still have an instant audience of 12k to say “hey, thanks for your past business go check our buddies out”.

That being said. Anyone have any drop-shipping experience? Any recomendations for companies with a decent variety of products that would be likely to sell at least some? Preferrably ones that don’t require you to use THEIR cart etc, I have a cart I prefer and can install it on a new domain and add their products myself, if I stick to one drop-shipper even easier. If not, anyone have any suggestions/ideas for using the list in some other fashion (aside from selling it, I’m not going to sell it for people to spam, I just want to use it once in they ‘hey thanks for being our customer check out our buddy bye’ type message on the list).