Amazon.com is a great store, it sells just about anything at very cheap prices. Too bad we don’t have a local one in Australia because I think there would be a lot of demand for one, especially since there’s nothing like it online here. (There are a few that tries to do what amazon does but are not very successful because it doesn’t have the variety of products and large user review base that Amazon.com has, this is essential for it to work).

The Australian dollar is back on the rise against the U.S. dollar so it’s more and more worth while to buy things like books and CDs from the U.S. The only thing that is holding people back is the shipping cost. I personally know people who wait until a group of friends also want to make an order and order together to save on shipping.

What if there was a place that connects Australian Amazon.com customers together to allow them to arrange group orders to save on shipping? This could be a simple forum where people can meet and discuss orders together, or a sophisticated web2.0 website with social networking built in and matches similar orders autonomously, and anywhere in between. Or, what if you provided a service to make the orders for customers? This approach would make you the middleman. This allows you to charge a commission in exchange for providing customers a piece of mind and saving them the hassle of deciding on a common shipping address and finding the right person to make the order.

Risks – things that would prevent the business from succeeding:
* lack of audience so not enough people know about the site to make it useful, this site would need an initial group of eager customers.
* Amazon.com rethinking their decision not to have an Australian store and actually building one here would render your service redundant.
* copycat websites possibly already with a large user base taking your market share.

Any entrepreneur who wishes to start this business must be willing to take on these risks.

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