You need a counter cash registers cannot be placed on dining tables, coffee tables, or anything else. Go into Buy Mode, and head to the Surfaces sort. No matter what you sell, you need a cash register before you do anything else. It's not a terrible inconvenience it just wastes a little bit of time. That is, if you sell nothing but beds, and then decide to start selling potted plants instead, it's a minor pain to switch all your inventory around.

Once you decide what to sell, it will be a logistical pain in your butt to change to something else. One of the sample shops in Bluewater Village is an electronics shop, for example, that sells TVs and stereos. You can be Wal-Mart and sell a little bit of everything, or you can restrict yourself to one type of item. The game is lenient and doesn't discriminate between a specialty shop and a general shop.

The first question you should ask yourself is, what do I want to sell? No shop can run without having things for sale.