I suppose like, what store you are starting up. I think to get an online store at Ebay, you need to have sold five things privately before you can open a store up with them. As to the capitol required, that would depend on many things. Ebay I would imagine charges at least a monthly fee, if not a sale fee also.. You can check Ebay online and find out what their terms and conditions are. If you want to start selling eg, CD's or DVD's, you would have to know where to get these at wholesale prices, add ya mark up, then advertise them. Sound great! But what happens if you advertise a certain product, thinking that the wholesaler has hundreds of copies and he hasn't? So really, what do you do, buy 1000 copies of a certain product, then advertise them and only sell 10. If just say you actually make an item at home, that you wish to sell online? It might take you an hour to make and $5 in materials. You open a store and advertise the item at $20. For starters it really cost ya $15 to make, an hours labour and materials, so ya only get $5 less fee's per item. There is only so many hours in the day, that you really want to make these items yaself, day in day out, if they sell. You can do it of course, many people do, but I would suspect, you would need say at least $20,000 or more. You would need to be really successfull, I woul say, go to Tiawan and China, buy a thousand 'T' shirts or a container full, at 25 cents each, buy toys in the same lot for the same price, and whatever novaltie that you can imagine, pay ya export fee's and duties, work out a good margin on your limited stock and hopefully, ya get returns back with a profit.

Very little. If you wish to sell your own goods, then you can get a online store set up and running in a day for under $30. You are basically looking for business web hosting and a domain name. You can get hosting for as little as $5/month, and a domain name for about $11/year. Once you have hosting you can create (or buy) an online store website. Here you can list all of your items for sale. Running your business would be just like a brick and morter, except instead of "going to the office" you simply log on to your computer. Granted, this all depends on your specific situation. If you have a very large business and are going to try to be the next eBay or Yahoo, then you will need what is refered to as a dedicated server. These cost upwards of $125/month, but allow greater flexibility. Simply stated, anyone can start an online business or store easily and cheaply.