Want to Sell Online? Find a Niche.

. With all of those web sites out there, it isn't easy to try to find a different twist in doing or selling something. But it can be done. Take a company called Big Words. John Bates is one of the founders of the site that sells college books....

"It's a fragmented industry. We can consolidate it, give students a better price. Everybody hates the book store. Nobody wants to wait on line to check their bag, buy all their books and then wait online to get their bag again and then have to carry everything home at once. So we thought this would be a good idea and so far it has proven to be."

The founders of Big Words took their cue from Amazon.com, the virtual store that shook up the book world with its amazing success at selling online.

"One of the things where we compete very well with anybody else that's online selling books is we're very focused on students at bigwords.com. We have much better pricing for text books specifically and we also have a shipping model that gets the books there in three to five days. So, those are the two things that students care the most about. Saving time and money and getting their books in time."

And being on the web, they've found a surprising amount of international demand for some of the latest college text books in the U.S. You can find the site at bigwords.com