Today marked my 13th anniversary as an online indie wildcat seller, having cut my teeth at eBay and stayed there through several incarnations.
It seems so long ago, that day, when I sat at the Spencer Public Library, barely familiar with operating personal computers, registering the eBay ID I’ve since changed and can’t seem to get back: saintsteven.
I couldn’t have picked a better name-it sounds nice, doesn’t it? Like a guy you can do business with and trust? Thirteen years ago it was easier to grab a name. Saintsteven was based on a Grateful Dead song, “St. Stephen” which contains a line “one man gathers what another man spills”.
Boy, has that ever turned out to be true. A series of hilarious events including divorce, tax problems, death, disease, virtual bankruptcy followed. That of course is nobody’s fault. The chips fell. But let’s say that after three years of practice from my store front, things didn’t go all that smoothly or quite as planned after I left that little location for the Internet. I’d told the newspaper and the local radio station I thought it looked like a no-brainer.
My main eBay account has racked up a little over 16,000 transactions, I have a second which is poised for Top Rated Seller status in June that has another 300 transactions, and then there are the other venues.
You can figure I’ve sold 500 Things a year that aren’t mine (custom listings), so if I’ve been doing that all 13 years (I haven’t), subtract some 6500 Things from those numbers. We’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 Things I’ve mailed to other people which have been largely spun from straw.
Yes, there was a little stretch there where I attended local estate auctions and bought some stuff, and yes, I’m capable of snatching up fifty-cent Cross Pens at the Good Will Store if I know I can flip them for twenty dollars, but for the most part, those 10,000 Things have come from stuff I’m lugging around, through a move from the store to Royal in 2002, and another move from Royal to Lakeside in 2005.
But since November 2005, I’ve not ventured away from my little room to acquire any more stuff, and I’ve still got Things in racks and boxes and stacks and I have to constantly remind myself while I’m oogling some little object that I don’t need any more Things.
Unless of course the price is right.
It took a really long time to attain that luxurious position. It’s powerful as long as I don’t ask it be portable.
Not long ago Auctionbytes, an online publication about this business held a contest, good for a hundred dollars: share your best online selling tip. That’s my kind of contest and I set about putting some notes on paper, fully intending to come up with a tip (that I’m willing to share) but I missed the deadline due to an insane local week of dealing with dinky banking issues and an automobile part.
They gave the hundred bucks to somebody who said “sell internationally”. I can’t disagree with that, but mine would have been better now that I’ve thought of it.
Here’s my advice: build your own base. Do that first. In 1999, that was impossible for me. I had no computer, no knowledge of site building, fees for hosting were radically different, the Internet was still evolving at a crazy rate.
That’s no longer true. This site costs about a hundred dollars a year to host (or much less if you’re really alert) and that’s it. It’s all either personally designed by myself (I know I’m not an award winning designer but it works) or utilizes free software such as WordPress (blog) and Zen Cart (shopping cart), Cloudflare (security). DON’T GIVE THE WORD “FREE” MUCH EMPHASIS IN THAT STATEMENT. Open source software bring with it an impressive learning curve and demands lots and lots of ongoing education. And mods. But if you want “community”, mods are where it’s at.
So call that hundred dollars a year nine dollars a month. For that nine bucks I get “unlimited” storage (there’s a limit, but it’s bigger than me), which has translated into never paying eBay for an “additonal photo” (they’re finally doing away with that soon, but it’s been true for 13 years), and into accumulating a really nice visual resume if I ever want to show somebody the stuff I’ve handled.
It gets me a place to “be from” that’s not defined by guys I will never meet who are satisfying stockholders. Boy, are they ever satisfying the stockholders. And when I can be “from” someplace, I can switch listings from venue to venue. I’m presently using eight venues, if I can count 2 eBay accounts.
But most of all, I can administrate my own catalog. That’s not my busiest channel now, but I do know what I’m missing in the formula. Serious eBay sellers are supposed to cringe when they see that $9/month expense because they know that monthly eBay invoices are hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
All those venues get paid to get found and to consolidate sellers. If you don’t use them, you’re going to have to pay to get that accomplish that on your own. Probably. I’ve tested at Google for two winter seasons now. Selling what I sell (which does shift), I need to pay Google something over twenty dollars a month to attract customers. I don’t know what the number is because I haven’t gone there, but I know I can see SOME conversions at that twenty dollar level. If I’ve been handing a venue even two hundred dollars a month, there’s a lot of play in there.
That’s a luxurious position too.
Yes, there’s this guy and this lady on TV who ride titanium bicycles and drink really good wines who make $18,000 a month selling things they don’t even ever touch. I really can’t explain those people.
I can explain me though. Now I’ll got to bed and tomorrow I’ll get up when I think it’ll be a good time, and I’ll check the Empire. Two email accounts, a couple of social sites, a quick glimpse at the venues, and by noon my day will be all cut out for me. I know what I THINK I’ll be doing, and I know it’ll morph by mid-afternoon and I also know there isn’t a scenario under the sun that can come up that I won’t know how to handle (whether I like it or not) and THAT’S a luxurious position.
Lucky, I’m not sure.
