Every small town used to have a “general store” where you could buy a wide selection of merchandise to meet almost all your needs. These days that general store is often at Wal-Mart.

The problem with a general store is that if you are interested in a particular product, you will only find a limited selection. They can’t afford to use their limited shelf space to offer a wide variety. It only makes sense that they fill that limited shelf space with the best-selling products. Those products are not necessarily the best, but they are probably the best marketed products.

Limited shelf space is a problem that online eCommerce stores don’t have. Virtual “shelf space” is only limited by storage space on a web server. An e-commerce store might have hundreds of models of a particular item, and storage space on a hard drive would be negligible. With same-day direct shipping from vendors, the store wouldn’t even have to stock every item, so no warehouse shelf space is required either.

Since virtual shelf space is so cheap and plentiful, that means an eCommerce business that caters to a specific niche is possible. Take the niche online e-commerce store IntercomsOnline.com as an example. They sell nothing but intercom systems, wireless intercoms, video intercoms, and even wireless baby monitors.

Opening a pure physical store to sell only intercom system products, even in the biggest city, would be a complete failure. While it would certainly generate some sales of intercoms and baby monitors, these sales would not cover all of the overhead that a physical store has.

That is where an online store differs. A website is incredibly cheap to build compared to an actual building. And unlike the building, the website is accessible to everyone!

These e-commerce stores are creating endless choice marketplaces where consumers can get exactly what they want. The bottlenecks of the old supply and demand model are disappearing and everything is within everyone’s reach. When shelf space costs nothing, you can cater to everyone.

The world is also much less dominated by any of the traditional media where people used to watch only a few television stations and listen to only a few radio stations. The old broadcasting and television delivered a program to millions of people. While it’s not happening yet, the Internet is capable of distributing millions of programs to a single person. But what is happening now is that more people are turning their attention from traditional media to websites on the Internet.

Therefore, large companies can no longer dominate all available advertising channels as they did in the past. Therefore, even a small niche eCommerce site can compete with the big players and win customers.

Consumers win because they have a greater selection of products. Ecommerce sites win because they profit from sales. Even big companies win because they produce the products that sell and don’t have to spend marketing dollars to get the sale.

There are millions of small mini-markets to serve and these markets have always existed. But now, with niche eCommerce sites on the Internet, it’s finally possible to give consumers exactly what they want.