Common Sense eCommerce

Never mind the controversy surrounding Heather Mills and the allegations of being a gold-digger, etc. Throw that out for a minute and look to her bravery.

One leg real, one leg prosthetic, she danced. And danced she did on television in front of millions of viewers. She may not have danced perfectly, she may have stumbled once or twice, but she had the courage to get up in front of the world and give it her best shot.

What does this have to do with eCommerce and Small Business? Nothing and everything really. She’s one of those reminders that no matter what we think we can’t do or what obstacles stand in our way, that we can find ways to overcome them.

She also did this all for a passion of hers - animal welfare. Kudos and I will have to add her to my list of people I’d like to meet.

Heather Mills Voted Off Dancing with the Stars

If you sell items on eBay, maybe you’ve seen this:

Want to increase your listing’s chances of success? Use the Revise your item option to view personalized recommendations.

This message appears on your eBay items that don’t yet have bids. Ah…success. eBay’s version of “success” is simply whether the item sells or not. I don’t think this is necessarily success. If an item costs you ten dollars and it sold for 99 cents would that be success? It would be in eBay’s book (in fact, you would get a congratulatory email that said your item sold successfully), but hardly in anyone else’s book. Ok, you couldn’t look at just one item; you would have to look at all your listings overall. But if that 99 cent thing were repeated enough times, it certainly would not be ’success’.

My idea of success on eBay has to do with profitability. Profit is the amount left over from eBay sales after the costs and expenses are taken away. There are some costs that you can directly associate with eBay listings. These are things like listing fees and PayPal fees. I have a post on my other blog where I take a look at these in more detail (link here).

There are other costs of doing business on eBay that are not directly attributable to any specific listing. These costs would be things like shipping supplies, hosting charges for your eBay store, and storage fees (if you rent storage or warehouse space to keep your eBay goods).

All that stuff has to be paid for and there should still be money left over for you. This is my idea of sustainable ’success’ on eBay. Not to be confused with eBay’s versions of ’success’. How to keep track of the dizzying array of costs associated with eBay selling? Unless you enjoy doing lots of math, you might want to use an eBay calculator like ProfitCalc (link here).

Tags: eBay Success, Real eBay Success, eBay Profits, eBay Costs, eBay Profit Calculator

There’s a certain internet marketer, I’ll just call him ‘Jerry’ - not his real name of course, but since this is not exactly a favorable blog post and in the interest of not getting my self into libelous hot water, I’ll just change the name.

He used to write a wonderful, fairly regular email newsletter. It was fun to read, very inspiring, uplifting and informative - diffused with humor. I used to love to get them and always saved them off to read them again and again.

Then along came success for Jerry. As far as I can tell, BIG success. And the wonderful newsletters tapered off and eventually were replaced with sales letters, fewer and fewer. Now, the only time I hear from Jerry is when he is trying to affiliate sell something. Perhaps about 3 or 4 times a year now. Most recently it was that pipeline thing.

Jerry, if you’re only going to contact me when you have a big product launch, how do you think that makes me feel about giving serious thought to that product?

Funny thing is, he used to use such metaphors as “Jedi Marketing” and the “Dark Side” in talking about doing business on the internet. Now it seems he has succumbed to the ‘dark side’ himself.

As far as I can tell, ‘Jerry’ does not maintain a blog (that would have been the logical replacement for an email newsletter). The only place I can find him in the blogosphere is as a temporary blogger in various places in relation to product launches or marketing announcements.

I suppose ‘Jerry’ is probably just too busy now to write like he used to. Jerry, if you ever decide to get back to writing the wonderful material you used to, let me know. For now however, I’ve removed myself from your email list.

Tags: Internet Marketing, Internet Marketers, Internet Marketing Business, Internet Marketing Strategies, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I prefer to sell physical products versus selling a Service or Information Products. Don’t get me wrong.  There’s nothing wrong with selling a specialized service or information products.  They’re both viable and potentially profitable ways to build a business. 

In order to start a service based business or build a business around an information product you need to have specialized expertise in one or more marketable areas.  For example, you can’t just wake up one day and say “I’m going to start a bookkeeping business from my home” without having a solid foundation and preferably some experience in keeping books. Similarly, you can’t just say “I’m going to write an e-Book on Stock Investing” without having some very specific knowledge in that field.

This is great work if you can get it.  What happens if you don’t have a reasonable level of knowledge in a marketable area for service or information products? How about selling physical products?  Apart from eBay’s contemporary issues, it is still a great place to sell because you can turn product over quickly.  With strategic, well thought-out purchases, you can often turn the product before you have to pay for it! 

I am both an eBay evangelist and an eBay critic depending on the day, the lunar cycle, and other intangible factors.  I also see eBay as a springboard to bigger and better things rather than a permanent end-all solution for a business.  So if you want to just start a business, I still think eBay offers a good vehicle for that.
Tags: eBay Business, eBay Home Business, Selling on eBay, Selling Products on eBay

We often see failure as something to be avoided.  But failure is part of every business.  There are little ones and there are big ones.  Obviously, it’s wise to try to avoid the catastrophic failures.  But trying to learn from the little failures along the way can help you build a better business. 

For example, if you use QuickBooks for your accounting software, use the reports to see what parts of your business are loosing money and correct them. If a business entity is loosing money, try to figure out a way to turn it around or get rid of it.

One of the advantages of being a small business is that you can ‘turn on a dime’. Take those little failures and turn them into something else!

Too many little failures can lead to bigger ones.  Being aware of them and taking action on them will be a giant step toward success. 

Submitted by Viktoria Vidali in cooperation with Addie Rementer and Sarah Takahashi

This is a story about how three women developed an original approach to starting a business by including positive cultural components that helped overcome the problem of limited funding.  One of these components is the magic of elevating simple partnership trust to the level of real friendship.  The second is generous sharing of time, assets, and talents.  The third?  Daring to bring an enterprise to life by choosing communicating from the heart as an operating principle.

Handcrafted greeting cards and exquisite art works for personal gifts and interior decoration manifest the individual and common vision of Addie Rementer, Sarah Takahashi, and Viktoria Vidali.  These women are venturing into a new dimension that deepens the art of greeting and gift giving by providing a distinctive alternative to cookie cutter card and gift clichés.  Years ago, handwritten letters required not only time and fine penmanship, but thoughtful content and words of sincere affection; the same holds true for gifts, which were mostly fashioned at home.  Today, elevating greetings and gift giving to an art requires no less.  The act of giving should come from the heart and emanate — with memorable visual power and eloquence – recognition and honor of the loved one’s human value.

The New Woman

Hope for a bright future lies in the power and creative endeavors of the New Woman.  What defines the New Woman?  Her awareness of the need for more love and beauty in our world.  New Women are rising with ever-greater influence to transform this dark age of fear and insecurity into an era of peace, environmental renewal, and social justice.  Therefore, it is not surprising that their businesses often have higher goals than commercial success alone.  The New Women is quietly determined to dispel the illusion that “might makes right” because she knows, and history verifies, that every empire fell when deceit and greed replaced truth and charity.

Addie, a very young New Woman, is the team’s mixed media artist, and tells, in her own words, what made her want to participate:

When I was asked to be a partner in ‘Greetings With Heart,’ I knew intuitively that this was an offer I couldn’t refuse.  I had just designed an inventive line of eclectic images and was looking for ways to have it seen.  The opportunity was timely.

If I could use one word to describe what it’s like to start a business, even with good partners, I would choose the word…WORK.  However, if we LOVE that work, then the joy of accomplishment is well worth the effort.

The challenge of an undertaking with equal partners is to make the best of everyone’s strengths. For example, Sarah has a knack for summarizing the items we cover at our meetings, so she writes our minutes.  She also keeps us focused on priorities, which has made our team very productive.  Viktoria maintains our business records and works with Orlando, our web-designer, my good friend, and her talented son, to implement a short and long-term marketing strategy.  I had fun designing our logo and GWH’s initial commemorative print.

A loner by nature, I had to switch my thinking to ‘group mode.’  Initially, this was my greatest hurdle.  I had to relinquish control of the way I thought things should be done, and realize how important collaboration is.  Artwork is personal and it’s not always possible to let go of an idea that only the completed work does justice to.  We organized the company so that in our personal art we are free to create, without constraints.  At the same time, we collaborate to project one integrated image for our enterprise, like galleries and museum do.

Starting a business from scratch is trial and error and requires patience and a sense of humor, like the day I decided to wear a mermaid costume to a photo-op by a duck pond and found myself hopping around the park on a single fish tail.  I threw that gambit to the wind but will always remember how hard we laughed!

I LOVE to have fun while I work.

Sarah, also a young New Woman, has shared her passion for design and crafts by giving handmade cards to friends and relatives since childhood, and spontaneously decided: Why not widen the circle?

One of the reasons I love ‘Greetings With Heart’ is that it combines the beauty and sweetness of creation with the intensity and good sense of enterprise.  This combo comes through in our website as well as in our meetings and how we treat each other.  We often have breakfast at Viktoria’s lovely mountain home.  We gather around a big round table, gab about what’s going on in our lives, and when the dishes are cleared, exchange ideas and brainstorm.  It is a comforting approach because we truly act as a team.

The process of starting ‘Greetings With Heart’ was as relaxed and fun as I imagine starting a business can be.  As partners, the three of us have fostered a strong bond with one another by maintaining open lines of communication.  Success for us is more than having a profitable business; it’s having fun.

Viktoria, a New Woman with a camera, gives us her picture:

In my reading I came upon an intriguing and bold statement, which, at first glance seemed too good to be true: ‘Do something you love and it will bear fruit.’

Now, there are two essential ingredients to this recipe.  The first is to find something you REALLY love to do, and the second is the active verb ‘do,’ which requires a commitment to keep moving forward.

We spent several months designing and refining our collections, securing the best and most reliable suppliers, discussing quality, size, pricing, packaging, shipping, deciding which nonprofits we wanted to support, and in the process grew to appreciate just how many details have to be fine-tuned before a product can be placed on the market and how important it is to project a cohesive business philosophy.

I saw symbolism in all this, even in our amusing mistakes or my silly episode, which was at the time not so funny.  One afternoon I crawled in ice plant on a plateau overlooking the beach to take a close-up picture of a wildflower.  Within hours, I broke out with a terrible rash.  The culprit?  Poison oak, lying triumphantly beneath the ground cover.  That went down in our history as Viktoria’s Secret Photo-op!

You can see from the pictures that I am older than Sarah and Addie (actually, they could be my daughters!), but speaking for myself, I don’t feel an age gap.  It is a real joy to be working with these young women, who have plenty of fresh ideas and enthusiasm to share.

Now that we all have the first ingredient, we look forward to testing the recipe to see what kind of delightful fruit the three of will bear!

The essence of what this team of entrepreneurial New Women has learned is that “getting your feet wet” is all it takes before stepping fully into the water and swimming.  Or, as the ancients have said: The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.  One thing is certain: courage and team spirit go a long way in making life the grand adventure it was meant to be.

Sarah, Viktoria, and Addie discussing retail card displays and placement at a Greetings With Heart business meeting. On the web:  www.greetingswithheart.com

This past weekend, I was working with an entrepreneur friend of mine who was setting up a small office. One of our tasks was to install Ethernet cabling.  I don’t know where he got it from, but he had a large spool of raw Ethernet cabling - perhaps several hundred feet - that didn’t have ends on it.  More than enough for the 4 stations we needed to cable.

His ‘money saving’ idea - Buy a cable punch tool and some Ethernet cable ends and make the cable ourselves.  “Have you ever put ends on Ethernet cable?” I asked. He had not.

That particular task is very detailed work and not something most people can just do right out of the starting gate.  You must cleanly snip the cable, remove a half inch or so of the cable coating, and feed each of the 6 wires into a specific slot in the end. And they must terminate in the cable end a certain way or they won’t work.  It’s delicate work and takes some practice to master.

I know this because I’ve tried to do them before. This is why we have cabling specialists.  Once I pointed this out to him and pointed out there was a Circuit City a mile away which sold ready-to-use Ethernet cable, I think he got the point.  We would have spent much more money (in time) than we would have saved by attaching those cable ends ourselves.  And we might have ended up with some poor quality cable.

Sometimes, as entrepreneurs we want to do everything ourselves.  But sometimes, it just doesn’t make sense.

A California man has learned the hard way that failing to do solid product market research has negative consequences.

Derrell Brown said he paid a toy maker in Taiwan about $6,000 to create 1,400 talking Schwarzenegger action-figure dolls that mock the actor-turned-governor’s trademark line from the Terminator movies. When you touch the Schwarzenegger doll’s arm, it says “I won’t be back.” But with polls showing the Republican governor going into next week’s election with a double-digit lead over his Democratic rival, Phil Angelides, Brown’s not finding much of a market for his wares. He said even charity groups won’t take the dolls off his hands to give to needy children on Christmas.

Link Here

First of all, I think this exposes the risk of developing a product based on a political figure or political event, especially that far in advance. Politics being what they are, anything can happen within one year.

His market would have been limited at best even if Schwarzenegger’s popularity had not changed. Only a percentage of those who would have voted against Schwarzenegger would likely have bought such a doll.

Furthermore, his product cycle would have been limited by time. Even if everything would have worked out to his favor, who would buy such a product 1 or 2 months after the election?

Product research and development is a big subject, but this illustrates that a lot of factors have to be considered and balanced with the risk involved. Sometimes, they just involve common sense and avoiding the whimsical.

A lot of people think of success as wealth. But it’s amazing the number of fellow entrepreneurs I speak with who sell online and who have never taken the time to think about what success might mean to them.

It may be wealth, it may be fame (or both), or it may just be things like independence of the ‘Dilbert Cube’, doing something you truly enjoy, setting yourself up financially for retirement, raising children to be well adjusted adults, and so on. Whatever it is, we can only get it if we set our sights on it.

One of the definitions of the word “success” is ….an event that accomplishes its intended purpose. If we don’t define what our idea of success is, it will be difficult to set up the goals needed to reach it.

– Frank Ross