All the keywords, optimization, and fresh content sure helps but I’m an impatient person.

Lame metaphor to follow:

Imagine you’re at a cocktail party with all of the big names and every one of your competitors.   King Google is in the far corner chatting away with Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Jeff Bezos, and ignoring John Donohoe.  What are my chances of being seen in this crowd?  Slim to none and, yeah I’ll say it, slim just left town.

There is a way to be seen that you may not know about.  Given the above scenario, I’d rather saunter up after a few cocktails and slip King Google my business card than wait for him to look at me across a very crowded room and size me up to see if I’m potentially worthy of a chance to pitch my products and blogs on his site.

Here’s what I’m getting at.

A while back I submitted every web address I own (there’s more than a few BTW) to Google.  Here’s this tiny little blog that I neglect regularly and don’t do nearly enough with on Page 1 out of 809,000 results.  This surprises me most of all because there are many larger “internet moguls” than I.  Many that were totally serious about using the title to describe themselves too.  Look down.  There’s John Chow…  :-)

Page 1 on Google

Here are my various business personas that come up when I type in “vintage around the clock.”

Page 1 on Google for my various business personalities – eBay, eBid, eCrater, eTcetera.  Out of 552,000 results.

I checked my other pages, blogs, and personas and they ranked well too.

“So what?  Big deal. Google’s not everything. “, you’re thinking.  You’re right.  They’re not.  But they’re something.  And they’re free to submit all of the pages, blogs, and stores that you want.

Did you know that it’s simple to submit your URL directly to Google?

If you’re impatient like me, just go here and give Google all of your business and blog sites.  Every last one of them.

What’re you waiting for? Down that appletini, push the big guys out of the way and head over to the King and introduce yourself.  It’s possible on the internet.  Don’t try this at your next mixer though.

More SEO tips to follow soon.  I’ve been working on all kinds of fun stuff.

What are your favorites ways to get seen at the top of the search engines?

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1927 Jello recipe booklet

I know I’m not alone. I’ve sold a lot of these types of booklets to fellow foodies who understand that these recipes are classics and were meant to be kept, cherished, passed on, and best of all, MADE and eaten!

This was the last thing I listed today.  Of course I had to leaf through and check out the recipes inside.

What do you think we’re having for a snack tonight about halfway through The Biggest Loser? That’s right.  Strawberry Jello!

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I didn’t take a week away from ALL work, just the listing, blogging (not a lot of that was getting done anyway), and basically spinning my wheels tweaking listings.  My orders were still shipped every day and all Best Offers and customer inquiries were handled daily.

Originally I thought that one hour a day would be sufficient to handle all of the above.  Wrong!  The first thing that I realized was that my shipping is taking me way too long for the amount that I have.  Whether it’s my level of distraction while doing shipping or the disjointed way I do it that’s the problem I’m not sure.  It does need to be streamlined however.

After a few days of sun, fun, non-business reading, and garden daydreaming, the brain fog lifted and some business issues that needed work came to light.

• As I said above, my shipping needed to be streamlined. I had already gone back to using Endicia exclusively.  For some reason about a year ago I started using PayPal shipping.  Blech!  Don’t know why I waited so long to go back to Endicia but I finally did.  It’s so much easier and faster.  No one has ever been able to tell me why PayPal doesn’t do First Class International shipping either.  That’s a mystery I guess.  Goodbye PayPal shipping.  I don’t miss you.
• Double (triple) listing on multiple venues needs to be stopped immediately.  This is the main reason for my spinning wheels and causes too much confusion.  I have a pretty good idea now (after years of doing this) which venues are best for which items.  Pick one and list it there.
• My days of selling new products are soon over. This was never the avenue that I wanted to go down and just because there are products nearby that I have access to does not justify (at this point) selling them.  There are so few new products that I can be competitive and stay within my formula of getting at least 250% of what I pay for an item.  Any seller knows that a margin like that is best found in used, or in my case, vintage products.  A better reason to stop selling new products? They don’t excite me. My thrill of selling a Made in China widget just because I can is minuscule in comparison to the joy I get from selling that unique, hard-to-find collectible to just the right collector who was ecstatic that I offered it.  Trust me.  This happens frequently.  And I love that part.
• My eBay listings need to be reviewed daily for possible ending and re-listing on another site.  I’ve been doing this more often and will now be doing this task daily.  EBay fees are not in proportion with what I currently earn there and some fee-trimming is overdue.  I have Amazon, Etsy, Bonanzle, eCrater, to list on and will be trying ebid.net.
• I get too many emails. I’ve been sifting through my Inbox during my vacation week and unsubscribing to just about everything.  My favorite blogs have been moved to Google Reader and I have bookmarks for all the rest of the sites that I like to read.  I do NOT need most of the emails that I get.  The necessary work emails are more than enough.
• Social media needs to be easier to navigate – Facebook, Twitter, and the like serve a purpose personally (Facebook is my water cooler) and for business but they can become total clocksuckers.  :-)  I’ve just made lists on Facebook – an A List and B List – of my friends that I read regularly.  Everyone else I can read when I have time.  It’s not hard to be on my lists.  If you’ve had any interaction with me at all and you don’t post products all day long or Twitter incessantly, you’re on the lists.  By the way, hiding Twitter and Tweetdeck from my Wall has helped clean it up immensely.  I recommend it to anyone who’s tired of reading a status update that ends in a shortened URL.  Damn that bit.ly!  I don’t have time to click on it to read the rest!  Now I don’t see them at all. Good riddance.

Another thing that occurred to me last week was that I am a one person operation so “simplify” should be at the forefront of every major decision that I make.  K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) should be my mantra.  There is no shipping department, photographer, listing team, or inventory shopper here other than ME, so time is precious (isn’t it anyway?) and wasting it is not an option.  I also needed to be aware that because I am only one person, I need to stop comparing myself to sellers that have warehouses, business partners, kids that do shipping, brothers who are photographers, etc.  I am what I am. (Popeye was right.)  Stop comparing myself to others and just keep at it.  It’s for the most part supposed to be fun.  Right?

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What better day to add to my Etsy store that I created a few weeks ago?  I still have some tweaking to do but I’m pretty happy to be moving some invisible items from eBay to Etsy, which plays much nicer with Google from what I’ve read.

Here’s my new store.

I’ll be posting my results here if they’re blogworthy.  Several of my friends do very well on Etsy.  Even though nothing in my store will be handmade, every item will be vintage, unique, and quality.  Any of my ephemera, cabinet cards, photos, books, etc. that were languishing on eBay will hopefully get some new life on Etsy.  I have some prints that will go directly to Etsy since I think they’re a better fit there.

I won’t be delisting many items yet because I still hold out some semblance of hope that eBay’s new search might actually be better than the current abyssmal one I’m suffering with right now.  You never know with eBay though.  They’re such a wild card right now with their Core Search that I’m just about worn out from trying to constantly “please” their Search Gods.  Their algorithm changes with the wind and quite frankly, I’m tired.  It’s still in the back of my mind that if things remain the same as they are now, I’ll close my store and just use the 100 free auctions and also list some FP.  Move the rest elsewhere.  The deadline for that decision is three months, possible two if there’s no significant change upward.  Just typing out loud at this point.

So I wanted to share my new store with any reader that wanted to take a look.  It feels good to breathe some fresh air into some listings and also have a place to move eBay listings to.  The price is the same (.05 per month) but I suspect that the search on Etsy is WAY better since they were one of three venues that originally partnered with Google in December 2009.  On that note, I got an email from eBid.net that it’s my one year anniversary today on that venue which is one of the three also (eCrater being the third).  I’ve got so few listings on eBid (one maybe?) and I’ve done close to nothing there even though I bought their $49.95 Lifetime Membership last year – free listing for life? I think.  This is another place that I’ll be investigating closer.

How will it turn out?  Your guess is as good as mine (might be better), but you’ll hear it here first.

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Had a dentist appointment this morning.  Not looking forward to it.  Couldn’t put it off any longer because I lost a filling in a back tooth.  Thank you caramel popcorn…  I was a little peeved that the only day the doctor could see me was today because I was meeting friends for dinner later (I don’t get out much) and I figured that the Novocaine might still be in effect.  I was grateful for the appointment so I took it anyway.

With much dread (yes I’m being dramatic but I’m a big baby when it comes to any doctor visits) I headed to the dental office.  I arrived on time, reviewed the insurance info and was called in less than three pages of US Weekly later. Wow!  This was going well.

The hygienist looked at the tooth, asked me if I wanted Novocaine (YES!) and the doctor came in less than a minute later.  Wow again!  He looked at the tooth, asked about Novocaine (YES!) and poked around some more.

The dentist looked again and recommended an alternate route.  ”A lot of times in this situation I can just sand the tooth down a bit.  There’s no decay and I’d have to take more of the filling to re-fill it” blah, blah, blah.  I started shaking my head “YES!” and told him if that’s what he could do, do it.  We all agreed.  30 seconds later.  Done.  My my my.  No Novocaine required.  We all laughed that this was the best kind of dental visit (for both of us) and I went to the insurance desk receptionist.

The receptionist said the magical words that we all long to hear “Your insurance company will pay for all of this.  No payment is required.”  Happy happy joy joy!  I was put on a list for a cleaning and sent on my merry way.  Nirvana.  Ten minutes total.

I was so happy that my time away was so short that I stopped at the PetSmart down the road because I had printed up some internet coupons that were only good for a few days.  If you don’t know about these coupons, let me just tell you that they don’t come out often and they’re only good for a few days. Inside of PetSmart my day was about to get even better.  Almost all of the cat foods and treats that we buy regularly were on sale and my coupon was for $15.00 off of any purchase over $50.00.  We feed a LOT of cats so that’s nothing for me to spend.  My $63 purchase was just $48.  The leftover coupons were gifted to the young couple who parked next to me.  They had two toddlers and looked like they could use a break.  Maybe Fido got some extra treats today.  I hope so.

Stopped and got Frosty’s and sandwiches at Wendy’s on the way home.  It was back to work I go.  But I was avoiding something and had been for days because I just didn’t want to deal with it.

Should I deal with an eBay issue today when things in general were just going so well?  Why not? I didn’t want to ruin it but I also didn’t want to deal with them on a bad day either.

My issue stems from their Free Store Upgrade Promotion which started on January 26th.  You knew this was coming if you’re a seller too.  We all predicted that this promotion was a bit *ahem* over-advertised – something that eBay does so well, i.e.  the “New store fees are LOWER than ever” BS.  Nobody believes that.  anyhoo…  At the time of the new store promo upgrade no one believed in the FREE part either and I remember making the comment “I’ll be watching my invoices closely to see how free it is.”

On my March 15th invoice I was charged a full Basic Store fee of $15.95 plus $24.17 for the Premium store upgrade.  It’s not even April yet and ebay “promised” that there were no fees until April.  Not really.  I looked on the eBay discussion boards, which I don’t usually do, and it didn’t take long to find this thread:

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/topic/Clothing-Shoes-Accessories/Heads-Up-Check/520191014&start=0

I was also made aware of this issue in my daily email from AuctionBytes.  Here’s the link to the Letter to Ina Steiner http://letters.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2010/3/1268877033.html.

Both threads indicate that eBay Customer Service admitted to an error on eBay’s part and some sellers received an immediate refund.  Some didn’t.  Some received different amounts.  Odd.

As much as I dislike contacting eBay CS, I bit the bullet and finally found it again (it’s not easy BTW) and did the Live Chat option as I’ve done before.  I dislike the phone, the Muzak, the eBay propaganda, the on-hold-forever-while-my-ear-sweats thing.  Live Chat is direct to the point and I can work while I wait.

And wait I did.  Initial wait was about 20 minutes.  Explained to the rep about the charge and after a few vague stabs in the dark she informed me that I would have to be transferred to “Stores” for an answer.  Ok.  Not sure why I didn’t get there originally because ‘Store’ was in my search query but whatever.  Now I’m in a line of 8 people in queue.  Longer wait.  Finally in.  I explain again.  Was told that the store fees are charged a month ahead.  OK.  That makes sense but why wasn’t the Basic fee pro-rated at the same time since the Premium rate was easily pro-rated to be tacked on.  She couldn’t answer that and just kept telling me that I would be getting a $7 credit.  Next month.  Why next month, I asked?  Why not now?  Couldn’t get a straight answer.   I attached a link to the EBay Discussion Board where sellers were talking about their immediate credits and were being told about eBay’s admitted error.  I mysteriously got transferred mid-sentence and the transfer got cut off.

I was now back to the beginning.  In a queue as if I had never called.  Waiting.  8th in line again.  Now I was in this just to see what would ultimately happen.  Would they give me a credit?  Was there a better explanation?  Would I just hang up and get some productive work done?  What do you think happened?

After I was “in queue” for another 20 minutes, another rep came on and asked (for the 3rd time) for my ID and name.  I gave it to her and told her she was the fifth person I had waited for.  She advised me that there were “system issues” and apologized.  I told her that it wasn’t her fault.  My issue was detailed again.  She was nice and helpful and tried to explain again that the Store fee was billed in advance and pro-rated and that the credit will be issued next month.  I really do understand that part (now) but I still had to ask her why the credit could not be processed this month since there was no problem pro-rating the fee this month.  Her answer was basically “I’m sorry but I can’t issue a credit but if you’d like to talk to Store Billing (or something like that) they may be able to give you one.”

Seriously.  This was when I gave her the link to the Discussion Board.  No answer other than “Would you like me to transfer you now?”

I let her transfer me because this game just wouldn’t get any more fun if I couldn’t get in line one more time.  Now I was 17th in line.  Whoops!  Disconnected.  Back to the eBay Live line that I started with.  This is where the game stopped.  Two hours later.

Yes I’m being charged for a Store and a Half this month.  I shouldn’t, but I will take their word that I’ll get some sort of credit next month.  No one at eBay can explain to me why they have no problem charging an additional fee this month and expecting me to wait until next month for a credit.  That’s the eBay we’ve all come to know.

We all know by now that when they say it’s FREE it’s really not, and when they say that the new fees are lower, they’re really not.  I’ve never been an eBay cheerleader, but I’ve also never felt so adversarial toward them as I have this last year.  I totally understand sellers that walked away.  I almost walked years ago when virtually overnight eBay bulk-changed all of my 1500 book listings to “Acceptable” condition also known as “it has a cover and all of the pages but don’t expect much more” kind of condition.  ”Acceptable” condition is the lowest that Amazon will sell and is one tiny step above Piss “Poor” condition.   Some overpaid eBay executive thought that this change was somehow an improvement.  But that topic is a whole ‘nuther blog post.  If you’ve ever wondered why my “bookstore” on eBay has very few books in it, this is the reason.  I pulled over a thousand listings after my one-by-one hand-graded books were all downgraded to “Crap” condition when, in reality, they were “Very Good” or better.  They’ve been selling quite nicely on Amazon over the years which is where all of my books are listed.

This is turning into War and Peace and “I hate eBay” which was not my intention so I’ll stop here.  I don’t “hate” eBay.  I just don’t trust them.  I don’t feel that they are in any way looking out for sellers, and I do my very best to avoid the drama, their customer service, and their discussion boards.  I really like to sell there and will continue.  But I’ll be looking over my shoulder, adding up my invoices, tweaking all of my listings, and complying with their ever-changing rules.  As long as the bottom line makes all of the trouble worthwhile.  Right now I’m on the fence.

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The way I see it, this list is a microcosm of our society’s buying habits.  Our society scares me.

These customers were so desperate to get these listings that they went to the trouble of putting themselves on a waiting list.  Not a bad idea.  Except that when I think too hard about it, I can’t understand why there would be a waiting list for Me and My Likker (A Revised Edition) .  This was listed in my last Out of Stock report post which was about 6 months ago.  Not only is it still on the waiting list but, according to Amazon, there were many recent customers added to it.  Contrary to popular opinion, hillbillies can read.  Apparently there’s internet in them thar hills too.

People fascinate me almost as much as these lists.  Here’s an example of what I can only guess is a popular activity since this book is sold out and buyers are waiting impatiently to get their hands on it, among other things. 101 Sexy Dares has one copy available at $399.99 or, if you’re smarter than the average dumb person, you’d buy the Kindle version for $14.27 plus the Kindle for $259.99 and still be ahead.

I’m hesitant to admit in writing that I might just find this book hysterically funny:  Cyanide and Happiness: I’m Giving You the Finger.   I’ve never been easily offended and the more unpolitically-correct, the better.  Now if I had just known about this book and it was sitting on my shelf right now, I could cash in BIG.   But I guess my adult serious side has now surpassed my formerly- juvenile sense of humor because I’ve never heard of this comic book and will probably never see it on This Old House or Antiques Roadshow.  Guess I’ve aged.  Boo.

The Olympics is surely the cause for the run on this book: When I Grow Up I’m Going to Be a Hockey Star .  How did Wayne Gretzsky or Bobby Orr succeed without this one?

This book has nothing to do with pins that say cool things.  It’s about a magazine that was published in 1950 for less than a year.  And people are still lining up to get the reprint.   Best of Flair is definitely something to look for at your next estate sale.  This one will net you a few lobster dinners if that’s your thing.

Last one for today.  Did you know that you can get certified to be a PMP?  There’s an exam and flashcards are available for study.  Just not right now on Amazon. Flashcards for Passing the PMP Exam is possibly something that my husband could use because he’s a PM.  He doesn’t use the title PMP because he’s not certified.  Or maybe because it just sounds stupid.

On a somewhat serious note:  Silliness was in order today due to a variety of sucky events over the last couple of days beginning with a funeral for a childhood friend and (hopefully) ending with some crappy business issues.  More silliness may be required.  Forewarned is four-armed.  sick  ;-)

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This went to a 14 year old whose father told me that the piano on the cover was a 1923 just like the one he just purchased for his son who would be thrilled to get the piano book that matched it.

Estey Piano Book

This little item went to someone who was very pleased with it according to the feedback they left.

Pioneer Blackstone Washing Machine booklet

This buyer collects menus and was thrilled to get this one.

1944 Thanksgiving Menu

Even though I screwed up this sale and had to mail each item out separately, I had the most wonderful, understanding buyer from Canada that really loved both of these vintage items.

Cake Decorating Set and Aluminum Measuring Spoons

This was one of four yearbooks that a customer purchased from me.  I’m sure there was an upcoming reunion.

Yearbook 1957

Do you sell vintage? Don’t you love the stories that go along with the sales?

What’s your favorite one? I’d love to hear it.

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Why can’t I sleep and why is my head spinning? During another night of insomnia I did some more navel-gazing (I’ve been doing a lot of that lately) and what I concluded was that there were many reasons for my dazed confusion.

EBay is changing again. Once again we were notified months ago of some mysterious looming changes ahead that we would be given “plenty of advance notice” in order to adjust our listings – again.  Oh my!  What could they be?  No one knows.  Let’s all speculate on the chat boards as to how they’re going to screw the sellers again.  The naysayers come up with every horrific scenario under the sun and I start to believe some of it.  Some bad things have happened in the past, right?  It could happen again.  Well, the announcements were made, the dust has settled, and I won’t detail the changes here because they’re still new and won’t even go into effect for 10 weeks.  In a nutshell, I’m not the least upset with any of the changes.  When I get my May invoice I will know for sure whether I’ve been had or not.  My head hurts just thinking of all of the time I will spend between now and then while I go forth with my new listing plan under the assumption that eBay is telling me the truth.

I’m slowly focusing on doing more business on other venues. I just uploaded 1000 listings to my store on eCrater and I’m pleased that it was so easy to do.  However, I need to adjust each listing and take out the eBay lingo and references to my eBay newsletter and to adding me as a “Favorite” – an eBay thing.  I did one page of 40 listings yesterday and that was enough for one day.  Some of the words were pushed together and the categories needed to be changed on each one.  I’d like to have these done by the day of the first Google upload (1/31) but there’s no way that I’ll have 25 more pages done by then.  Crisis?  No, but I’d like to look somewhat like a professional seller.  Oh well.  On the plus side, this is an absolutely free venue that gets a phenomenal amount of Google hits (I’ve been tracking it for a long time) regardless of the “prettiness” of my listings.  But my head spins just thinking about all of the revisions that I need to do there to get up to speed.

I sell on multiple venues. Even though I have an inventory management system, it doesn’t work for all venues so I must still manually delete some items that sell.  It’s also time-consuming to keep up with all of the changes that occur on each site although eBay has all of them beat in that category.  At last count I sell on ten sites and track payment deposits, seller fees, returns, and customer inquiries for each one.  Some days Linda Blair’s head could not spin as fast as mine.

I maintain two blogs that I love. This one, which is more personal, and my shopping blog that I started in December because I love to share good deals with the readers.  If I made enough money on either one or both I could probably sit all day and write.  Let’s face it, hardly any one makes that kind of money blogging.  Bloggers write because they like it.  If I didn’t like writing, I never would have taken on the additional tasks of having two blogs.  I have some followers, whom I greatly appreciate, and I get a scattered comment once in a while (yay!).  Honestly, even if I didn’t have any readers, I would probably still sit here and blather on just the same.    Therapeutic? Yes.  Additional work?  Shakes spinning head yes.

I use a full spectrum of Social Media. Twitter is my friend.  I maintain a personal Facebook page as well as a business Facebook Fan Page.  I spend a lot of time tweeting and Facebooking.  Too much time probably.  LinkedIn is another place I network.

I’ve started to write articles for eHow. This site has been on my To Do list for ages and I’ve just recently signed up and written two articles there.  I have a long range plan for this site and it seems to be one more thing that I really enjoy doing.  Because I need more to do…  :-)

Should I scale back on something? No.  I like selling on multiple venues and I’m not ready to give up on eBay or my writing.   The social media is my connection to the outside world.  No way I’m giving that up.

Am I complaining? No.   Wah, wah, wah, right?!  Some days, but not many.  All of the above are choices that I’ve made a part of my life willingly because I actually like this whole gig.  It’s a lot some days, but I love it.  I just wish there were more hours in the day.  Until there are, I’ll just have to find a better way to unwind and stop spinning.

Do you also find yourself adding more to your list even though your plate is full?

How do you handle all of the multi-tasking involved with eCommerce? Make my day and leave a comment and let me know.  I’d love to hear from you.

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Believe it or not, in a roundabout way I got some business ideas from watching my cats deal with a recent dilemma.  Sounds silly but stick with me and let me know what you think.

Rewind to a few months ago when I started seeing my cats looking under my stove and sitting for hours just staring.   It went on for days and I thought it was odd but I wrote it off as a new cat “thing” that this lowly human would never understand.

A few days later my husband pulled a pan out of the bottom drawer of the stove and was met by a little fuzzy beast who squealed and ran back through the electrical cord hole to the basement.  Yes, we have a mouse in the kitchen and the cats had heard him scratching.  The mouse had probably been waiting every night for the lights to go out to make a mad dash Tom-and-Jerry-style to the cat’s food dish and then back under the stove.

So far the mouse had been successful because the cats were still on the job a week later.  Well, one cat was anyway.

It started out with three guardian cats day and night watching for the beady-eyed intruder.  Three cats with a mission all lined up staring at the most fascinating challenge that they’ve had in ages.  It was highly interesting for all three.  For a while.

Smoky was the first to give up. He’s a tail chaser from way back that gets distracted very easily.  He lasted at the stove front for a few days until he walked away for the last time to peruse a box, a ball, then a wood chip by the fireplace.  Any new object was fair game and he looked at them all.

Bear is a very laid back cat that is as sweet as he is lazy.  A good day for Bear is a 23 hour nap followed by a cuddle session then a feast.  He watched for the mouse for about a week because it didn’t require much effort and he really didn’t have many plans anyway.  After that week, he walked up to the corner of the stove and, much to my disgust, took a territorial pee and walked away for good.  He was done.  That mouse wasn’t coming out.  Buh-bye.

Tiny, the third cat, is an odd little character.  I found him in the yard 5 summers ago teetering on the edge of a cinder block by my garage.    He was all of a few weeks old and his mother was nowhere to be found.  I would never have seen him if my husband hadn’t pointed down to the ground to show me.  There was this little bag of bones kitten that ended up shunning the bottle that I initially tried to feed him with, and went straight to lapping from a saucer.  He was a scrapper even when he was a kitten and to this day I have no idea how he made the long trip from the neighbor’s barn far behind us to our yard.  But he got where he needed to be and he’s been happily spoiled ever since.

It seems to me that there are at least three ways to handle a problem and I have three cats with very different personalities that just happen to make this lesson clear to me.

When faced with a challenge I can do one of three things:

Try different things that might be more productive. Instead of just relying on eBay and Amazon for most of my income, I can put some effort into other venues that I list on and try new venues too.  My Google Analytics tracking tells me that eCrater and Bonanzle are getting more traffic all the time (especially eCrater).  I have accounts on both but I don’t spend much time on either one.  EBid.net just partnered with Google a few months ago and I’m a lifetime member (no fees) there even though I’ve not done much with it yet.  In the past I’ve gotten off track chasing every new venue under the sun so there’s a fine line between diversifying and getting distracted, but the aforementioned venues seem to be worth their weight these days so I’ll consider doing more business there.  I can also continue to try new ways to make money such as blogging and writing articles.

Say “Piss on it” and give up. Some venues were a total waste of time (OLA anyone?) and I’m glad I walked away from them.  One of my favorite book sites, Alibris, has just raised my seller fees to an amount that may make it unappealing for me to sell there anymore.  I’m also getting away from selling books in general since many are going digital, I’m running out of room, and local buying options are getting scarce.   As much as I love bookselling, common sense tells me that I should just phase myself out of it.  I have plenty of backup plans for that if the time comes.  EBay is one venue that I’m constantly reviewing to see if it’s still profitable.  Although it’s number 1 for me in income, the fees have become so expensive that when I really sit down and do the math, the big venue isn’t so big in my book anymore.  Giving eBay up may free up a whole lot of time to sell on less expensive venues.

The third option is to persist with a laser-like focus. This isn’t a strong point for me and my plan is to try harder on this one.  The first two options are much easier to put into practice.  Those options aren’t wrong in some cases but I wonder sometimes if things would be different if I only focused on one venue.  I read a lot of blogs (to the point of distraction) and I’m not so sure that my fellow eBay sellers who limit themselves to just eBay are feeling really great about the venue either.  Persistence can sometimes be confused with beating a dead horse.  I’ll know in a few months whether I will continue on eBay or pull the plug.  If they take away eBay stores, they will have made the decision for me.  Without my store I would have to run continuous auctions and if my sell through rate is what it is right now then hello dead horse, goodbye eBay.

Ask Tiny about persistence.  Look.

He's focused.

His gaze is laser-like.

He’s still there.  He’s in the kitchen right now as I write this.  Focused.  Persistent.  Taking on the challenge.  Bear’s snoozing in front of the fire.  Smoky’s playing with a new dustbunny.

Where’s the mouse?  I don’t know, but if he surfaces Tiny’s going to be the first one to greet him.

Have you changed your business model this year?  Does it include eBay?  Are other venues working out for you? I’d love to hear from you.

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Business was OK for my Christmas sales, not jump-up-and-down wonderful like some months in the past, but just OK.  I had happy customers and lots of sales and I’m grateful for every one of them but… I’m not quite where I want to be yet.

I’m feeling the slow and steady demise of eBay in my big picture.  Seems like I’ve been wanting to spend less and less time there even though it’s still my #1 venue for sales though not as much as they used to be.  Without spending much time at all on my Amazon listings, my sales there are slowly stealing eBay’s hold on that #1 spot.  It’s not difficult at all to do business on Amazon either.  EBay, however, is fraught with hoops to leap through, feedback issues, frequent price increases, lower traffic, and daily changes that require complete overhauls on a regular basis.  On Amazon, I list a product, reprice if needed, and wait for it to sell.  Period.  On eBay I’m constantly trying to figure out it’s latest search formula and then tweak my 1000+  listings to accommodate this mysterious, ever-changing algorithm.

Change isn’t easy but the writing on the wall is telling me that if I don’t change my business model soon there won’t be enough hours in the day for me to continue to do all that is needed to make a decent living.

So what does all of this have to do with cats?  Nothing, so far.  Because I haven’t posted in 5 weeks, I’ll squeeze another blog post out of all of this in tomorrow’s Part 2 story.

Alright, I just mentioned what I wasn’t going to mention.  Why haven’t I blogged in 5 weeks?  I read a LOT of blogs and I intensely dislike posts that invariably start with “I know I haven’t posted in ages but ….” while the author blathers on about being (lazy, busy, sick) fill in the blank.  My readers are smart enough to figure out that December is a busy month for online sales, hence “I’ve been busy” seems to be the main reason.  But you knew that.

I’ll continue this too-long post tomorrow and it really will be a post about what I learned from my cats about my business.  Captivated yet?  Here’s a precursor to what you won’t want to miss:

Is it just me?  Are you feeling a major change coming too?  Is eBay becoming less of a player in your online business?

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