I think the people who are the most successful in this type of business are people who have worked retail in the past and have some understanding of customer expectations (even if they are not always reasonable) and how to deal with customers. And that in particular, if you are having a bad day, you don't take it out on the customers, and that if you're an opinionated sort of person it's sometimes better to keep your opinions to yourself rather than risk offending customers. You have to run a business as a business, not as a part-time hobby. I don't mean that you have to have a full-time retail establishment or anything like that, but the thing I think some people don't realize is that once you deeply offend a customer they are probably gone for good, and once you sell them an overhyped product that doesn't perform as advertised, you are going to have a very difficult time getting any repeat business from them.
I think the reason so many sellers of FTA equipment have come and gone over the years is because either they just didn't seem to care about their reputation, or they "oversold" the equipment they were offering, making it sound like whatever they were offering was the greatest thing yet when in reality it had many bugs and issues. I'm not singling out any one seller here, I'm just making an observation that happy customers are returning customers, whereas disappointed or offended customers rarely return, and they don't refer their friends. And I do realize it's probably getting a lot harder to get quality equipment out of China these days, but that decent equipment from other countries is priced so much higher that customers won't pay the difference, so that makes it difficult for sellers.
One other pitfall I have seen is where a seller will overbuy on some item and then try to continue pushing their old stock rather that obtaining newer models to sell. Nobody wants five year old receivers even if you still have a pallet full of them sitting around, unless perhaps you are lucky enough to have some "classic" model that did everything right. If you are unlucky enough to have bought too many of a receiver that is a real dog, either because it's buggy or it's overpriced compared to the competition, don't keep pushing them as the top items on your web site because potential customers will think that's the best thing you have to sell and move on. The real moral is, don't overbuy in the first place - try to only purchase what you know you can sell. You don't want to be like the guys that only had DVB-S receivers in stock when DVB-S2 took off.
Personally I think the future of the hobby is not going to be in the type of receivers we've been used to, simply because people are changing in the ways they view TV. If I were a seller I would not invest in any expensive receiver that only allows viewing on a single screen. If a receiver costs significantly more than a Roku or an Amazon Fire TV device but still limits you to viewing only on one connected TV, that's going to be a pretty hard thing to sell in the very near future.
