This idea is for those of you hell-bent on making some serious passive income online.
There’s a lot of work upfront and by comparison to other ideas, there can be a fair bit of work on an ongoing basis.  But if you automate as much as possible and/or hire a VA in the Philippines for example, you can get it down to just a few hours a week.
Anyways, so here’s the idea…
Find a product or group of products that are hard to buy locally for people (anything nichey works, from magic trick supplies to specialized bedding), aren’t that easy to buy online (or you can otherwise rank high in Google), and then setup your online store.
Sort out a drop shipping arrangement directly with a trustworthy provider and voila!
There’s a lot more to say on this and it ain’t a case of one two three voila, so I’ve spent a fair whack of time going through the process in a separate article.
But getting back to the main thing here; look for products to drop ship that are in the $50-$200 range, are cheapish to ship, are pretty stable over time (ie not always being updated / changed / running out of demand) and cannot easily be price-shopped online (eg branded cameras are easy to price-shop, whereas something like aqua blue bedding with it’s different mix of thread count, material type etc, is much harder).
UPDATE: I much prefer Chris Guthrie’s white label products and sell via Amazon strategy.  He’s create a whole course and software program to do this smarter strategy.  I bought it as we do a lot of ecom like this.  It’s pretty much spot on with our strategy.
Not cheap, but it took us years to learn how to pull off this strategy perfectly – and the software alone will save you weeks of research!