There’s a joke in the restaurant trade:
“How do you make a million dollars running a restaurant? Start with two million”
I’d assume similar sentiments apply to fish stores, especially going by the overall trend I’ve seen reported here of stores closing down as they increasingly cant compete with
Amazon and online vendors.
Going by the stores I see that enjoy success:
1. The core business really needs to be aquarium services. Setting up, cleaning and maintaining aquariums - generally larger fancier ones. In the U.S. there’s a ton of these in doctors offices and other similar businesses - the LFS that primarily do this work seem to be the ones that do best in the current market.
2. Dry goods. You’ll never compete with
Amazon or online vendors on price. Not even close. These will need to be primarily sold as part of your service business and by “added value” you can offer with service to new entrants and helping them get setup.
3. Live and dry rock - have a vat of live rock in water, and shelves of dry rock, and an area where you can help customers with rock scapes as part of the setup process.
4. Live goods are likely to be a loss leader. These are expensive to buy, expensive to ship, expensive to keep, and die all the time, especially fish in tanks that don’t have habitat - ie tanks fish are kept in for sale.
5. If you’re really good at keeping corals and have frag tanks and so on you might be able to culture some corals to offset point 4. If you’re not really good at keeping corals you might want to reconsider this business plan.
6. You’re not far from the ocean. One option if the water quality is good (low pollution) and you have storage and transportation capability is to offer Natural Sea Water as a product/service.
7. You’re dealing in species that might be tightly controlled for trade and import. Look carefully into the laws surrounding this in your jurisdiction.
