It looks like my eBay invoice for April (after The Venue trotted out the “lowest listing fees ever” but forgot to mention the numerous increases) is going to be around $221.84, depending upon how many Things I close today yet (a Friday, not known for big sales).
I know you’ve all been wondering.
That’s a little off, but business is a little off. For a long time I’ve lived in the $300-350 range.
Had I not lopped off nearly 50% of what I was running it would have been a lot higher. Store operators now pay listing fees of around 600% of previous prices if they don’t upgrade their store subscription (pay more on the way in), and I didn’t upgrade.
I moved to two sites with no listing fees, and my own site with no listing fees OR sales commission fees. The two sites were Amazon and Bonanzle, and they’re both capable of generating some traffic (no question about that at Amazon and Bonanzle’s membership is now ten times what it was when I joined a year ago).
Frankly, I’m most interested in what happens at my own site. Ten years ago (or more accurately 11), when I started to move to the Internet from my storefront, there really wasn’t much practical hope of building a site of my own that would get found and do business. Among many other things, I was lacking the savvy-I had to do my apprenticeship.
These days there’s really no reason a seller has to find the big platforms to present however. My brand new cart is drawing traffic while I’m still tweaking the adjustments and haven’t done any marketing (or purchased any adwords).
It’s conducting sales.
The technique is a little different, you have to think about the process a little more, but I’ve got plenty of analytics about the Things people were looking for when they landed here and the moves they made next and if there were ever a time that you could “do more of what’s working”, it’s now.
Internet marketing is STILL in its infancy, even if the big guys are totally ingrained. Serious independents like myself haven’t had our day yet, and AFTER THAT comes the phase where every single household online realizes their garage sales and classified ads and so forth can be on their own personal pages AND get found.
The more I hurtle into The Future, the more I like it.
