Wanting to start... some kind of... e-commerce thingy? I think? Maybe?

Sorry, it's another one of those "Hey I'm new, what should I do ?" threads. If you have already used up your tolerance for that kind of thing you might want to move on

Basically, I have a few hundred $ to spend and roughly 6 hours every day to go with it. I would like to attempt at trying to set up something online but I don't quite know which direction to go into. Obviously, I don't have much of a budget and so I'm not expecting any kind of fast success, and I am genuinely willing to put in the work. Even if I fail, fine, but I would still like to try, hopefully, I'll at least learn something. However I don't want to be pointlessly hitting my head against a brick wall either so if anyone here can bother with this post, and perhaps recommend what it might be beneficial for me to focus my efforts towards I would be grateful.

The two major things that seem to pop up as a possibility with a low barrier to entry seem to be affiliate marketing and dropshipping. I looked a little into both of those, to me they seem like something u would have preferably gotten into 10 years ago and are really hard to make work as a beginner at this point, not sure how correct that impression is...

In regards to dropshipping, it seems to be really competitive with new wannabe dropshippers consistently arriving. People seem to say Instagram is too saturated now for influencer marketing, drop shippers are running FB ads and selling products at very low margins and even at an immediate net loss to build up a backend, payment providers seem to not like drop shipping, people get their funds frozen, Paypal limited etc. It all sounds rather bleak and hard for a new dropshipper to compete with.

Also a little more regards dropshipping, if I did go into it, wondering how much of a initial budget would people here recommend? Obviously you need to pay for your e-commerce platform (so far I'm thinking Shopify) and domain, but u probably also need a few paid apps to your store, get someone to design a logo, maybe set up a business e-mail and a few additional tools/analytics and what have you? I assume you should also have a little cash in reserve for potential cashflow issues, and then obviously the main cost is advertising. I assume you should expect to lose quite a bit at first, trying to figure out what works (if you ever do.) So how much of a budget do you think I should roughly have to be able to give it a fair shot?

Affiliate marketing sounds to me just as competitive, and in my understanding, something that is even harder to make work with ads as a beginner as your margins are lower, and something u probably want to leverage another asset to drive traffic to. Starting a blog seems to be a popular thing people recommend but it seems like that's something u need to work on consistently for years before u can expect it to start paying off, of course, that's assuming you even have the capability for good writing that would engage people. Now I'm not chasing a quick buck and I know building something valuable takes time but several years of consistent work with almost no initial return is a little too much right now. Perhaps it's something I might run as a secondary project but not as my primary initial traffic source. Basically again, it seems really competitive and I'm not really sure if you can realistically hope to profitability drive traffic as a beginner at this point without leveraging an existing asset?


Thank you if you made it this far, and sorry for the long rambling post. I would very much appreciate any comments on how realistic/accurate my thinking is, wheter I'm missing some options, and what should I perhaps look more into and invest my energy in. Thanks again!