The US has about 20 million businesses with only one person–the owner.  Except for rare cases like plentyoffish.com (the #6 online dating service in the US, and #1 in Canada, serving hundreds of thousands of love-seekers every day), one-person microbusinesses are small money individually, but together add up to $1 trillion per year in revenue.

The number of free or cheap online tools for running a business is growing (see this article from mashable.com with 270 tools for small business).  Open source tools for business are increasing in sophistication.  But what about those times when even an eBay shop or PayPal button is too complicated for the budding online business person?

Enter the blogshop, a term used in Singapore to describe teenagers setting up a free blog with items for sale, usually funky fashions or accessories.  Forget shopping carts or credit cards for most blogshops–buyers simply email or leave a comment for what they want, then do a bank transfer, or hide ‘concealed cash’ in an envelope.  The buyers pick up their goods by mail, or by meeting at a subway station.  Sometimes buyers band together for a ‘shopping spree’ to Taiwan or Korea to pick up the latest fashions.

Blogshop directories like blogshopr.com and emall.sg list over 300 blogshops in Singapore.  A survey in the Straits Times found that 30% of blogshop owners spend over 20 hours per week on their sites.  It’s not the route that I would choose for starting an online store, but sometimes ease and simplicity win over functionality.

The story quoted a young business school student as saying she learned much more about business from her blogshop than her ‘boring’ lectures.  I have a difficult time imagining a ‘boring’ business school lecture, but that’s just me…