Getting Traffic To Your Ebay Shop

When summer comes, things can start to slow down a bit with online sales. People prefer to be outside in the sun,enjoying themselves rather than sat on their computers. Who can blame them I do too. What it means to online traders is the traffic may start to fall to your website or eBay store. The sales trend line usually dips for a few months for many online traders. Instead of sitting back and accepting this, you can engage in some proactive marketing to pull the traffic in.

What never fails for me is putting auctions up on EBay to get people into my shop. During the winter months, I don’t bother with auctions, preferring to sell everything from my shop using BIN. I get plenty of traffic and plenty of sales with little effort. As summer approaches, and things start t slow down, my strategy is to put some auctions up. I see this as advertising. I’ll choose a few items and put them up for auction. I stagger the items and always put them up for 10 days. My objective is not to sell the item fast for a high price, if I get a good price for the item that’s great, but it’s not important.

The purpose of the auction is to get exposure for my shop. Auctions on eBay are highly visible. EBay is, after all, an online auction house. Auctions are its mainstay and EBay gives them plenty of exposure. With an auction running, people will come to visit it. When they see your auction, they will then be tempted to visit your shop listings and buy something.

This always works for me. Things had started to slow down a little so I put my first summer auction up three days ago. The result is sales have picked up again over the last few days due to the exposure the auction is bringing me. I look at auctions purely as advertising. Businesses are happy to pay for a classified in a newspaper with no guarantee of success and usually at great expense. I use auctions the same way on EBay. They’re my ads. The bonus is they’re cheap and they work.

I always start the auction cheap to attract interest. As I’ve already mentioned selling the item is a bonus. Many times auctions I’ve put up have been won for a price lower than I would normally sell the item for. I’m still happy because the sales I make in my shop on the back of the auction make it all worthwhile. You’d be surprised at how effective auctions can be at increasing the traffic to your shop.

Over the summer, I’ll be staggering auctions every month to keep the traffic flowing into my shop. Don’t just sit back and accept low traffic to your shop, get out there and do some aggressive marketing. Auctions are so easy to do and yet so effective. Try it and see.

Work On Your Business Not In It

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One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard about running a small home business, which I suppose, applies to any small business, is to work on your business not in it. I can’t remember where I read that advice but I can identify with it totally. It’s so easy to let your business dominate your life. It can become all consuming if you don’t take control of it. It’s important to keep everything in perspective.

I’ve met plenty of people in my working life whose whole identity is tied in with the job they do. They exist for work and the job they do defines their life. Their self-esteem is dependent on their position, the higher they get the greater they feel. They have lost perspective. If they are made redundant, they are stranded, left without meaning, with no depth to their character to pull them through.

Running a small business involves you doing everything from ordering, pricing, marketing not to mention the technical aspects of running a small business on a day-to-day basis. With such involvement, it’s easy to submerge yourself into the business and forget about everything else. When you feel this happening, take a step back and just press the pause button.

You are not your business. You are the owner, the CEO. Step back from your business and look at it in a detached way not a personal way. Detachment will enable you to make rational and logical decisions rather than emotional ones. If you’ve invested time and money in a product or strategy and it isn’t working or selling, you need to take a detached view so you can make a logical decision about what action to take.

You can’t do this if your identity is wrapped up in the business. Your success depends on a large part in making good decisions, even if in making a decision to take some action is an admission that an earlier decision you made was wrong. You can only do this if you are detached from your business. If you work on your business and not in it. Detachment will give you perspective. When things go wrong you won’t feel so bad about it. You’ll see things more clearly and take decisions that are right for your business and not based on your ego.

Bit busy At The Moment

I’m busy on a number of fronts at the moment. I’m planning a direct marketing campaign to some of my customers at the end of the month. The campaign is an experiment. I’m going to write a personal letter to a sample of 50 of my customers giving them an offer on my website, I’m thinking of a reduction of 10% but I haven’t decided what to offer.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about copy writing and have got a few books together which I’ve been studying for the past few weeks. Copywriting is a must have skill for selling on the web. It’s something you need to learn to make all your sales copy more effective.

I’m reading how to construct an effective sales letter without making it look like a sales letter. My plan is simple to bring more customers to my site and increase sales. I’m going to do it in blocks of fifty so I can monitor the response from each letter. If the response is good, I will cast the letter wider to incorporate 200 or 300 customers, before making it a regular monthly exercise.

To prepare for this I’m adding more products to my website and generally cleaning it up. I’ve been so preoccupied on EBay over the last few months I’ve neglected my site. I’ve made a strategic decision to concentrate more on my site, including daily marketing and to concentrate less on EBay over the summer.

EBay can be time consuming. I’m not leaving EBay, it’s too good of a marketing tool for that; but I’m putting more time into marketing my website over the coming months.

Another thing that is consuming much of my time at the moment is trying to design a better blog. I’m looking to design a good header for my blog. I’ve contacted a few designers but wasn’t happy with what they came up with so I’ve decided to give it a go myself. This has required me getting to grips with Photoshop. I’m not looking for anything spectacular, just a nice clean header that I can transfer to any blog theme I choose.

I’ve got great plans for my blog. Before I can bring them into being though the first thing I need is a header and theme. The theme has got to be right to accommodate the plans I have for the blog. I’m going to put some effort into designing something over the next week.

The New Age Of Non Retirement

The days of the traditional concept of retirement are disappearing faster than a snowflake on a hot grill. The paradigms and beliefs of the past will not work in the future and the future is already here. The old method of working most of your life then suddenly cutting it all off at 65 is over. More and more people are redefining what it means to retire. Rather than move passively into retirement many middle-aged people are shunning this view and starting their own business.

The question is why? What’s changed? Well first of all people are living longer. When the retirement age of 65 was set back in the distant past, it was an age that most people would never reach. Most working people exhausted their lives in coalmines, factories or other enterprises were luck to reach 50. If they made it to 65, it was a real achievement. The government who set the retirement age knew few would reach it.

Today things have changed drastically. The average 65-year-old today is active and fit and can look forward to years of healthy life. The government knows this, which is why they are making noises about increasing the retirement age to 70. The problem is for people who have been laid off in middle age the likelihood of finding another decent paying job is remote. They’re too young to retire and too old to be attractive to businesses who still labour under the illusion that youth is always best.

The second problem is lack of money. Many people have seen their pensions seriously eroded and in many cases disappear totally. Corrupt bankers and stealth government tax grabs has destroyed their retirement pot. They need to keep working to provide themselves with an income. The state pension is a joke for people who have worked and contributed all their lives. It’s starvation level. It wouldn’t cover the average MP’s Sunday visit to their local B & Q.

The market place, where there are too few jobs and too many people chasing them offers little for someone in middle age that has been laid off. The only option available to them is self-employment. Many are turning to this route. In America according to official statistics, nearly half of all business start-ups are by middle-age people. The UK is following the same trend.

Another reason why people are shunning the traditional retirement model is to stay engaged. There’s only so many cups of tea you can drink in coastal cafes before it gets boring. Only so many visits to shopping centres. If you’ve been a daytime TV watcher all your life who’s lived off the rest of us, there’s no problem. You’re already brain dead anyway. For the majority however such a mundane existence of constant inactivity, of pointless journeys is an existence of hell. After a lifetime of active participation in economic life to be suddenly unplugged can be a disaster. Plunging many into depression.

The new middle age are redefining what it means to reach middle age. Fitter than ever, keen to remain engaged and determined not to be passively pushed aside they are the new entrepreneurs. Our economic landscape is about to be transformed over the coming years. The new middle-aged are arriving. They’re not coming on the back of a creaking cart being pulled by a tired old donkey. They’re charging over the hill on sweating stallions, swords raised high ready to destroy the old ways of enforced retirement.

What To Sell

The first thing you need to decide before starting your business is what you are going to sell. Everything else is secondary to this decision. Once you’ve decided what you’re going to sell the rest can be learned as you go along. Getting a website, marketing, pricing and all the rest of the things you will need to get to grips with, all come later. The first big decision is what to sell.

Let’s narrow it down. Are you going to sell products or a service?

Physical Products

There’s so many products you can sell online that you’re spoilt for choice. To begin with there’s physical products. Actual widgets. I strongly recommend that if you are selling physical products you start on Ebay. I have made a number of posts on this blog about the reasons why so I won’t go over them here.

The kind of physical products you sell is really up to you. A few things to take into consideration though are the size of the products. Your business is going to be online so shipping will be a factor in your work load and your chance of selling the product you choose.

A few years ago a friend and me set up a computer business. We bought ex office computers from an auction and resold them. This model wasn’t successful on the internet because once the postage cost had been factored in it took the price of the computers too high.

Not only that but the work involved in packing the computers and arranging shipping was time consuming. It wasn’t simply a case of walking to the post box and dropping a few parcels into it. We has to organize a time for a driver to come and pick up the computer, so we were tied to the house. This was inconvenient when you are working full time.

On top of that sometimes the internal parts of the computer became dislodged during shipping. When the customer received it and turned it on, it didn’t always work. So we had to pay for shipping it back. Selling computers on the internet is not a good idea unless you’re Dell. I’d advise you to avoid this product.

The point I’m making is to consider how easy it will be to ship your products. I sell art products on my website and through Ebay but there’s some products I won’t list because I don’t want the hassle of shipping them. For example large size paper and canvasses. The profit is not worth the work involved in shipping them so I don’t sell them.

You don’t want your online business to become a monster that rules your every waking hour. You want to be in control of it. You want to dictate how much work you put into it. Ask yourself how much work will be involved in shipping this product.

You will also need to establish a good supplier. If you are going to specialize in selling in one genre like toys or baby clothes etc, then you will need to find a supplier who is cheap, allowing you to achieve a good mark-up. The supplier should also be reliable.

Make sure you choose a product that sells. Obvious I know, but important never the less. Make sure there is a market for your products before you commit yourself to buying stock. This comes down to basic research.

It’s good if you have an interest in the products you decide to sell but it’s not essential to your success. If you’re a keen cyclist who sells cycling products then you will be a source of valuable information for your customers.

As I said, though it’s not essential. I’m quiet knowledgeable about art products now but when I started, I didn’t know anything about them. I’ve learned by reading the manufacturer’s sales brochures about their products and by visiting art forums.

You will soon acquire all the knowledge you need about whatever products you decide to sell in no time. If you’re undecided, what physical products to sell just go browsing through EBay and see what is selling. Look at how much they are selling for then source the products wholesale and work out what margin you can get from it. If it’s a good product, easy to post and it’s selling well, it could be just the thing.

I’ve rambled on a bit in this post; in fact, I’ve gone on a bit too long so I’ll discuss the second part of the post “selling services “next time.

See ya

Paul

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