I remember back in the mid 90's all the IBM stores (does anyone other then myself remember these?) had OS/2 Warp displays selling both the OS and various shrink-wrapped software available (Object Desktop and Describe were common to find, among others). The stores also sold other IBM products (computers, laptops, software, etc). I don't know how well any of the OS/2 stuff actually sold.
I was working for IBM in the early PC days. I was also one of the employees who got an original IBM PC (the one that had 16K of memory, expandable to 64K on the motherboard). I spent some time learning the basics (literally) so I knew a little bit about them (OS/2 came later). I spent some time in the store, teaching the staff about PCs, and DOS. IBM saw fit to staff the store with people who knew next to nothing about PCs, or DOS (not their fault). Most customers already knew more about it than the staff did. The store was closed, before OS/2 appeared on the market, as being not profitable (I wonder why???).
OS/2, when it appeared, was used by a couple of large IBM customers, who did most of the support themselves, and a few of the IBM sales people, who needed to know a bit about it. I doubt if the general public ever made any sense out of the pathetic ads that IBM put on TV, and I don't remember seeing OS/2 in the local stores. It was a very small market, poorly serviced, which probably explains why it never flew.
But at this point I would say the best option for selling OS/2 / eCS related stuff is online for software, and just pick up hardware locally.
I agree, but there is a major problem with deciding what hardware to buy. By the time a couple of people buy something new, and figure out whether eCS will work, or not, then make a report, the model in question will be obsolete (no longer available). You can't just assume that a replacement model will be similar (usually, they are not), so it is a case of starting over. Re-sellers have the same problem, so it is pretty risky to buy a new machine to pre-load with eCS (I wouldn't even consider trying to use OS/2 on new hardware). If it works, great. If not, they need to recycle the machine into the windows world, and hope to recover their costs. Then, they start the whole thing over again, probably after losing a customer because it took so long. You can't just go out and buy 100 new machines, because the market isn't that big, and you run the risk that eCS won't run on any of them anyway. It used to be that desktops were a little more flexible, because video, NICs, sound, etc. were plug in cards. Laptops, and newer desktops, are pretty much one piece, so you are stuck with what you got. My last two laptops (Lenovo ThinkPad T510, and L530), took MONTHS of work (part time) to get them to work reasonably well (WiFi still doesn't work, and sound doesn't work properly on the L530). If I was selling these things, I would lose half of my investment, simply because they were obsolete by the time I got them almost working. One way to actually do it, is to buy used equipment (lease returns, or similar), and refurbish them. Blonde Guy does that, but I think it is not a money maker.
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