Lessons Learned From My Cats

15 January 2010, 2:37 am

It’s a new year! Happy 2010! With every new year comes plans, resolutions, promises, new goals and ideas. This year is already nagging at me. I’ve been feeling a strange unease for the last few months that is telling me that something needs to change. Is it the usual stuff? Do I need to quit smoking, lose weight, start exercising, improve my business? Well, I quit smoking decades ago, I need my extra 20 pounds for winter warmth, I’m counting my 3 times a month yoga class as my exercise program… which brings me to that last thing.

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: