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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