Ecommerce Highway

The online merchant market is a free entry market. Anyone with a minimal investment can become an e-tailer (other jargon for online merchant). I personally know a lot of merchants who don't even have a warehouse or a store selling the products, they own a website with products and once an order is taken the item will be drop shipped by a distributor with whom the merchant is contracted with.
http://www.dropshipfeed.com/ is a similar distributor with whom online merchants are signing up with.
This type of system gives plenty of room for the merchant to concentrate only on marketing his website and leaving the mundane logistics and customer support worry to the distributor. These type of e-tailers are called as drop shippers. For drop shippers, Marketing and PR becomes a time taker in any days work. Most of them due to financial constraints try attracting traffic to their website through search engine marketing (Includes vertical search engines like CSEs), affiliate network etc.,
As this market is an easy entry market they would be facing tough competition. There would be thousands of merchants selling similar products. So before becoming a merchant you should also plan for a clean exit strategy. You should know when to quit a particular product line, a particular category or even bid adieu to the business. Remember that at times a loss might pull you so badly that it will be hard for you to come up again.
To succeed in this industry merchants should always keep themselves abreast of the market knowing what are all the top products that can be sold at that particular moment; where it can be sold; what price it should be sold; what are the various prices points quoted by other merchants and who are all the competitors.
But again, gathering all the information requires a lot of time and effort to specialize. Mostly being one man army and low financed, such online merchants seek the help of professional outsourcing companies which could do the job for them.