Stop Milking Me! - Cow’s Journey To Financial Freedom

I shamelessly admit that I am a Starbucks addict. A year and half ago, I spent $160 a month on their drinks. Now, after numerous rehabs, “Jamba Juice treatments” and budgeting, I am down to $40 - $60 a months. It is still not pretty. So I was determined to find a way to further reduce the cost. Finally, I have found a way to drink Starbucks for free!

The answer? The Starbucks’ Bearista!!

If you have a year 2000 Asia version of Dragon Bearista, you are sitting on gold. Check out the following eBay bid. The $12.95 9 inch tall bear is sold for $580! Yep, you are sitting on gold if you have a few of those.

Well, I am not that lucky. Plus, I only have to come up with about 50 bucks a month. Luckily, the Starbucks bearistas have become hot collectable items on eBay. There are some crazy bearista lovers who would spend 50 bucks on a single bear to complete their collections. I started buying and selling bears on eBay a couple of weeks ago. The profit I made in two days is enough to cover two months worth of White Mocha.

I know I won’t reach financial freedom by buying and selling the little teddy bears, but I can probably fatten up my Starbucks fund so I may not need to pay for Starbucks again – at least that’s what I am hoping for.

It’s fun to list your junk yard stuff on eBay. But when it comes to a real business, this thing takes A LOT of time!! Here is an example of how much time I spent on just one listing:

1. Research – 30 mins - 1 hour
2. Taking pictures and refine the pictures: 20 mins
3. Writing description: 15 mins
4. List the item: 10 mins

Total time spent on just one item could be anywhere from 75 minutes to nearly 2 hours!! Not to mention the 4 hours I spent on writing a HTML template with a StyleSheet.

Plus my regular day time job, I am working 16 hours a day. Boy, I am really exhausted. But hard work pays off. Finally, my eBay id acmekwglobal has an unique look and feel that I am pretty happy about.

So far, I have listed 15 items on the site and have about another 40 to go at the moment. But my mother’s retail store has about … boy…. 20000 different items!! Not sure if I will ever finish working on all of them.. But I will stick with my “turtle theory” and move a little bit forward every week. One day, I can build a sizable store. It’s a hard start, but I am really enjoying it, which is the most important thing.

I found a small guide called “My 13 steps to profitable auctions”. It’s pretty interesting and has some good insides. Check it out.

I attended an official eBay Univeristy’s “Advanced Selling For Serious Seller” course this past Saturday. Although the presenter was very good at telling real life eBay stories, I felt that majority of the stuff can be found on the web and other free sources. If you have already opened up a store or having been selling for a while, this course isn’t going to be advanced at all for you. So spend your 60 bucks elsewhere.

The only good thing about that course is the small booklet we received as part of the cource offering. Although they didn’t put a lot of juicy selling secrets in the booklet, it is a pretty comprehensive guide to teach you a structured way to sell, package, avoid negative feedbacks, dealing with unpaid buyers, etc…

A few tips I learned from the course that I didn’t know before:

1. Hot list. You can download ebay’s hottest sales each month via pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf
2. You can sell marked tome stones, but you can’t dig a stone out of a grave yard and sell it.
3. How to use second chance offer to the lower bidders since they are your potential serious buyers.
4. Combine shipping is the best discount/promotion you can give to the buyers if selling multiple items.
5. Some sellers actually put the following sentence in every listing :” Do not bid on my items unless you understand my strick policies.” Nothing turns away bidders faster than using phrases such as “Do not bid”
6. Don’t list the same item at the same time unless you expect to sell multiple at the sametime. Why competing with yourself?
7. Buy It Now is a good feature to have. It encourages buyers to bid. But use it only when you are absolutely sure about the price and add a couple of dollars to the usual price
8. Items with Reserve price tend to turn away buyers
9. Have a return policy and charge 15% or higher restocking fee.
10. You can sell Harrison Ford’s autograph, but you can’t sell his canceled check with his signature on it. You need Harrison’s permission to do that.

Right before my big plan to move our brick and motor kitchenware store online, I tested the water by buying and selling on eBay in the past a few days. I bought 3 items, all rock climbing gears and sold 2 pieces of junkies I’ve owned for a while. Unfornately, my shining yellow donut ring cushion which I used when I broke my tailbone might not have customers at all.

If you think selling or buying on eBay is easy, it certainly ain’t easy for me. The selling process took a lot longer than anticipated. I sold a game and my snowboard helmet, all ended up with decent prices. But I probably spent about 1 – 2 hours going through the past sales records and doing research. The historical sales data definitely helps me to optimize the sales. If you’ve never used this system, check it out.

I also did an extensive amount of research on one of our kitchenware store’s product line. The past sales data is very useful when trying to determine whether a particular product will sell or not, and at what price. By conducting the research, I noticed the huge difference between the eBay buyers and the main stream customers. For example, if you look at the past sales of the stainless steel pans which are only used in restaurant kitchens, the used ones are selling great on eBay but most of the new ones ended up with no bids. However, in the traditional brick and motor stores, the new ones are very popular. I guess the reason causing such a big difference in buying behavior is because most of the online customers are looking for deep discount bargains. Hey, if the restaurant customers don’t have to see what the chefs are using in the backstage, why bother buying new?

That said, the ultimate goal is to sell to the broader audiences in addition to the eBayers. But with eBay as a bridge, I can get a jump start on it. At least that’s what I am hoping for. The next three months will be my trial sales period before I launch an official online store. We’ll see how that goes

If you missed the first part about the options I have to run online store, here is the post.

Very clearly, I don’t think I will go with the regular e-Commerce channel. First of all, our kitchenware store has already had a domain and a hosting plan. Second, I can figure out the shopping cart and product catalog stuff with the open source code myself. The downside of the “doing it myself” approach is marketing and site traffic.

After running my own blog site for nearly a year, I am fully aware how long it takes for a website to be recognized by the search engine, thus drawing in the traffic. I launched my blog site Yuna’s Village last June. Despite all the cross-networking I did with other bloggers and sites, I could not draw more than 500 visitors a day. One day after Google updated its PageRank and assigned a 5/10 score to my site, I started seeing a surge in search engine traffic. A month later, my traffic increased to 1000+ visitors per day and stayed there. That took me nearly 8 months to accomplish.

Being said, I have made a “Multi-Channel” plan:

1. Start selling my own junk via eBay Auction. I have already registered a few days ago and selling 3 items at this moment. Here is my id: acmekwgloal
2. In one week, I will be receiving a pile of catalog of all the stuff my family’s store is selling right now. I will do a test drive by selling via “Buy it now” feature with eBay and see how the market reacts.
3. I think I will keep selling like that for about 3 months. During this 3 months period, I need to make good notes on errors/trials/lesson learned. Most importantly, I need to understand the competitors, the buyers, what sells and what doesn’t.
4. After the trial period, I am going to set up the pro store with eBay and transfer the domain. I thought about keeping the site at where it is and code the store myself. But I will miss out the big opportunity of the eBay traffic and the links from the eBay auction site. I also noticed that a lot of items people sell on eBay ranks high with Google too, thanks to eBay’s PR. Although I will be paying 20 bucks more each month to run the website and cut a chunk of profits to eBay, I don’t have to market my butt off to draw traffic. Since I get to use my own domain name, and have the freedom to design the site, the online store will keep it’s originality.
5. While selling on eBay’s pro store, I will have to use the usual techniques to market the site itself. I will increase the profit margins significantly if I can generate customers directly.

Why will this work? Because we’ve taken care of the most important part: Suppliers. We have tons of products for sell at rock bottom price, thanks to my parent’s hard work to set up this brick and motor store first. So I don’t have to go around and look for drop shippers myself. Hey, my parents are my drop shipper! How cool is that!

Regardless of the advantages I have, this is no quick money and it is going to take A LOT of work. But I am willing to do that now for the sake of future freedom. I may even discover other opportunities. You never know.

Instead of worshiping American Idol (Ok, I admit that I watched last night ’s episode), I spent most of my spare time these days to research the best method to launch an online store. Like I mentioned earlier, my family owns a brick and motor kitchenware store called ACME Kitchenware Plus. Because of my parent’s limited amount of energy, they coded a simple HTML website and it sucks! They are not selling anything on the site after paying a whooping $7.95 monthly hosting fee. I want to turn it around and start selling the stuff online.

After nights of reading and experimenting, I have concluded three major ways to sell via online store:

• Use a pre-packaged eCommerce service such as Yahoo! for small business, or Monster Commerce.
• Get a cheap hosting plan, download open source Merchant software and do it yourself
• Sell via eBay or eBay store

eCommerce Service
If you dig deeper, these services are the basic Web Hosting with the eCommerce software add-ons. You can easily manage your product catalog, cross reference the items, provide shopping cart and checkout features, or even integrate with major shipping carriers such as UPS. It’s easy to set up, however, depends on the plan, you may not get much flexibility as what you want to do on the site. And they charge you a monthly fee, which is a whole lot more expensive than a plain web hosting plan. The major competitors are:

• Yahoo! for Small Business – Basic plan starts at $39.99.
• Monster Commerce – Basic plan starts at $99.99
• Volusion – Basic plan starts at $57 with a limit of 100 products.

Open Source eCommerce
osCommerce software is the one I looked at. The source is PHP based and it is completely open for you to modify. It’s just like any other eCommerce software that has all the selling features. I actually installed one here as a playground, so feel free the check it out. The downside is that you gotta be a real techie person to crack those PHP code and make it work for you. Fortunately, the osCommerce technical manual provides quite a bit of information as how to modify and where the files are. With those instructions, a programmer like myself can dig around the code and eventually figure out the ins and outs of the software architecture and make any mods I need to.

The Good Old eBay
Selling through Auction has been around for a while, even the eBay store isn’t anything new. Now the serious sellers can setup prostore to sell the goodies. It’s funny that even before I lifted my finger to register my first account with eBay, I got a brochure from them about ProStores, a newly launched program that not only allows you to have all the benefits of the regular eBay store by listing your items on eBay and cross link them, but also host your website with your own domain and look and feel. Starting fee? $29.99 a month.

What is my plan?
Well, I do have a plan as which method to use. I will discuss that tomorrow.

Believe it or not, I have never sold anything on eBay. It just never happened.

Now, with my giant plan to set up kitchenware online store(s), I will have to test the water myself. In this past weekend, I rolled up the sleeves, set up an account with both eBay and Paypal and started selling and buying.

I am currently bidding on a rock climber’s chalk bag and selling an old PS2 video game “Devil May Cry”. It’s a shame that I have 0 transactions right now and am probably the most undesirable seller/buyer in the eBay community. So I don’t really care if I am paying too much for the bag or getting nothing for the game. I want some positive feedbacks right now so I can sell serious stuff later.

In the same time, I am studying really hard trying to find an eCommerce software or service to launch the store. Bottom line, eBay might be a channel for me to sell some stuff, but my main goal is to build my own stores online. It might be a stand-alone-store, a Yahoo store, an eBay store, or a combination of all of the above.

It’s a big plan, but I am starting small and taking baby steps. So first, let’s see how my bid goes… You can search member id “acmekwglobal” to peek at my sales on eBay Community site.

One of the three projects in 2006 is to launch an online store. Since my parents have already setup a kitchenware store back in my hometown, it’s only nature to expand their business venture to the online customers.

I have been an online customer for a long time, however, never a seller. I had some help when I sold a few of my games on eBay, but other than that, I have never made a single penny out of online sales. So, I am really starting from scratch here.

I think the main things that will determine if the store will be successful or not will depend on:
1. Products I sell
2. Site Design
2. Marketing the site
3. Technology that runs the store
4. Shipping and handling
5. Customer Service

Every piece of the puzzle will be crucial and I expect lots of errors and trials before I find the right formula.

First thing first, I will have to define the product group and the target customers. Most of my parent’s customers are commercial restaurant owners. Can I sell some commercialized mechanize to the consumers? The best way to test the water is probably through eBay. So let’s get rolling! I asked my parents to identify 20 products for sale. Once I get the list, I am rolling them on eBay to see the market reaction.

In the meantime, time to study other online retailer stores’ design and how they all sell products successfully.