When starting a gift basket business from home, you'll need to designate a special area that's used just for your home based business. Not only will you need a computer to keep track of income and expenses, you'll also need a phone to take orders or talk to prospective clients. You'll most likely need filing cabinets to keep track of your home based business activities and paperwork, plus you may need work space for putting each of your gift baskets together. For a home based gift basket business, you'll also need a clean, dry space to store your gift basket supplies.

Once you know where your primary work space will be for your home based gift basket business, then you need to figure out how you'll sell the gift baskets you make. You could for instance, run your gift basket business completely online through your own website. Alternatively you could run your business strictly through auction websites such as Ebay. Many home based gift basket businesses like to start smaller though, and simply sell gift baskets to friends and family, or sell them at local flea markets and craft fairs.

Knowing how you will sell your gift baskets though, and what kind of people will most likely buy them, will help you to know how much supplies have to be bought at once, and how much money your business will be able to charge for each gift basket it sells.

Starting a home based gift basket business will require that you have a reliable supplier too. Usually people start out making gift baskets as a hobby, or as gifts for friends and family, so sometimes they already have suppliers lined up when they get ready to start the gift basket business. If however, you've always bought your gift basket supplies at local retail and discount stores, you'll be better off searching around for wholesale supply sources instead. This will allow you to buy supplies for many gift baskets at once, and you'll be able to pay less overall for those supplies too.

When you're running a home based gift basket business for example, you may find that you need to create ten of the same baskets in one day. Going to the store and buying enough supplies at retail price to make ten baskets will get expensive. If you have a wholesale supplier instead though, you can simply order enough supplies for a certain number of baskets at once, and pay about half the price of retail.

Regardless of where you buy your supplies though, or how much you buy at once, a very important part of starting a home based gift basket business is keeping track of the money. You need to track how much money you spend on your gift basket business supplies, and how much money you make from each gift basket sold.

It's very important too, to make sure you're pricing your gift baskets high enough to earn profits. Your gift basket business will not last if you spend $20 on supplies for a basket that takes one hour to put together, and only sells for $21.