Ask HN: Sports footwear - distribution, shipping etc.

So, I play a bit of sports. And where I'm from footwear in particular is bloody expensive and selection is poor. Expensive isn't always the end of the world. I can always seem to hit eBay and buy myself a pair of footy boots or Nike Air Jordans for about half the price of what I pay here.

So, I say to myself, there's a potential market here. Hmmm, Maybe. I'd like to test the waters, but from what I can gather this is extremely difficult.

I'm interested in purely sporting goods, but I think this is applicable to any business where you dip into "real products" i.e. stuff you need to ship and this definitely falls out of the realm of my expertise.

I don't think this will end up an empire and to be quite honest, I'm more interested in serving a need and I'd like to use proceeds to help development in the various sporting organisations I'm part of.

First of all, my options seem to be:

- Buy stock. Stock++. Sell stock. Stock--. Ship. (I don't want to be in the stock business. Large up-front investment)

- Drop shipping. This seems in theory a brilliant idea, but seems difficult to find drop shippers in this particular market.

- On-demand orders. I could list items that I've sourced from other websites that ship to my country and essentially broker the sale plus markup. Ship to me, re-package and re-ship. It makes the shipping really long (and not forgetting customs headaches), but it seems like an "easy" way to start, but full of work. - Be a pure aggregator. Put the customer in touch with the various sites, either broker the exchange or look at affiliation. (hey, hacking related!)

Does anyone have any knowledge or experience of these industries, in terms of product sourcing, distribution and shipping that they'd be willing to share publicly or privately?