I received a number of PMs yesterday with ideas:
1. Image hosting/sale - this would be the easiest, but most costly to implement (because of hosting fees). Nice because it would be all online (no shipping product), user to user. I'm thinking about approaching various existing image hosting sites to see if they'd be interested in accepting UTC as a payment option.
2. Auctions - not hard to implement, but several existing crypto auction sites have shut down recently, seems risky.
3. User to user marketplace - also not hard to implement.
4. Traditional retail marketplace - best long-term option, need to figure out supply chain piece, would need a lot of day-to-day support. I'd do this if someone was willing to take over that part of it (deal with suppliers and provisioning/shipping), split the fees.
5. Specialized marketplace - this could be anything - the idea of selling "preconfigured" miners for UTC would be a great idea. Easy to implement, would need to partner with someone that could provide the miners.
6. Buy UTC direct online, without using an exchange
Other things to figure out - pricing: price for product in UTC (time of sale, daily average, etc.); other coins to accept (UTC only, discount for UTC, BTC, etc.); how to handle returns (I don't even want to think about that).
My vote would be # 4. / and 5.
There are several other coins that have tried auctions and it just doesn't work. I'm sure someone would buy a 486 processor for UTC, but it's hard to get good products listed.
If doing a traditional store, as I mentioned; you could easily import certain items, buy certain items on ebay and even have special items acquired during certain superstore sales. Possibly you could conduct a survey of items people would wish to purchase, but most likely you would have to be able to maintain none to minimal stock. There are many things out of china that can be bought in small lots; which have a decent mark-up in the states.
A small example is the little cigarette lighter USB plug-ins. You see these a lot in the States at gas stations and such for 4-5 dollars; delivered from china these are about 1.40. Solar panels, batteries, chargers, inverters and many other things can be purchased like this I suppose.
Many people on Ebay currently purchase items on sale at superstores like newegg. These are sometimes 20-30% off normal price. There are quite a few powersellers on ebay that, list these same items @ newegg price after the sale is over. This would allow "special" items to be listed in a market; camera, PC component, audio, etc.
You could have no stock and just drop ship items; however that would limit price, location and possibly delivery times. As well, you would need to find 2-3 distributors willing to sell single quantities. Worst case you'd have to buy lowest retail price, but again limits volume relative to pricing.
dunno, just thoughts