An e-commerce concept I believe could work wonderfully is serving markets "near" those served by traditional shopping. For example, when buying furniture, there

An e-commerce concept I believe could work wonderfully is serving markets "near" those served by traditional shopping. For example, when buying furniture, there is either the traditional way of buying a ready made piece cheaply (e.g. IKEA), or get exactly what you want from an artisan very expensively. What if you could get something that is very much like the ready-made piece, but with something changed, e.g. width, depth, material etc? One could have a showroom and a ready made collection of items, but allow each customer to do some level of personalization. The parts would then be shipped in IKEA style brown boxes, with the pieces cut automatically to shape with CNC machinery. In that way, you could get to a price point where custom made is competitive. Similarly one could perhaps sell clothes with similar concepts where the user constructs the piece of clothing online (e.g. pick collar style, change coloring etc.). I at least always find clothes that are great except 1) They don't quite fit 2) I dislike a particular detail, but there is no way to fix this in the brick and mortar model.