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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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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