<i>A service that would, once a month, deliver by mail ALL of your needed toiletries - toothpaste, shampoo, shaving cream, deodorant, soap, etc. These would be the products you use normally - Old Spice, Colgate, Gillette, etc. The prices would be equal to, or often less than the store prices.</i><p>Amazon Subscribe and Save already offers this service:
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Health-Personal-Care-Subscribe-Store/b/ref=sv_hpc_7?ie=UTF8&node=1260921011" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Health-Personal-Care-Subscribe-Store/b...</a>
If I heard this startup pitch I would want to know what experience you have in retailing and especially logistics. I wouldn't care at all about your web or programming expertise.<p>Suppose you were doing this without computers or the web. Customers filled out a paper order form and you then fulfilled their standing orders. This is very similar to what Schwann's and diaper services do now, and what milk trucks did when I was a kid. 75% of the problems you need to solve will be in old-fashioned logistics: purchasing, warehousing, picking, packing, shipping. Almost all of the remaining work will be customer service: returns, fixing mistakes, handling late deliveries and billing issues, etc.<p>Now add a web site to place and track orders to the business. It is a tiny part of the work required to launch and doesn't change any of the back-end "brick and mortar" stuff.<p>Amazon has the infrastructure in place to do both the hard (logistics/fulfillment/customer service) parts and the easy (web site) part. If you think this is something you can crank out in a weekend with a Ruby on Rails book good luck.
Something that would be a valuable addition to this idea would be a way of starting out by making purchases on demand, and then being able to easily automate them if they are regularly occurring. For example, I don't pay attention to how often I actually need toothpaste, so right now I wouldn't want your service because I don't know how much toothpaste to buy, and how often I need to buy it. But I might want it if it tracked the toothpaste usage for me, and then I could automate it if it turned out to be a very regular need.
Yep, as someone mentioned, Amazon offers a lot of this.<p>You should also look at Diapers.com and Soap.com which was recently acquired by Amazon.
<a href="http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/06/amazon-to-buy-diapers-com-for-540-million/" rel="nofollow">http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/06/amazon-to-buy-diap...</a>
Although I don't believe they offer automatic delivery yet, check out <a href="http://www.alice.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.alice.com</a><p>It's basically a direct-to-consumer marketplace for manufacturers.