Sorry for the long absence. It's been a busy month, and now finally slowing down again.
The question for the week is... Is social selling right for you?
First, social selling is any effort to sell a product within a group of interested friends. It's the same strategy as Tupperware parties of the old days, or Mary Kay makeover parties today. You find your social group, push your stuff on them, and someone usually buys it... even if they do it only to make you feel good about the effort.
There are quite a few venues where you can sell within a community of collectors, shoppers, and other merchants, but also many of those will help you go bankrupt while you are trying to succeed.
Many sites cater to very low priced merchandise, such as used books, quilt patterns, and secondhand clothes. Quite a few other social selling sites cater to everyday general merchandise within the community, from electronics to sporting goods. Think about it: when you go shopping for everyday products, do you go to the store filled with strangers, or that place they know your name?
What to look for:
Look at your user ID number when you register, or the site membership numbers if available. If it's below 1,000, you are probably wasting your time. Most sites now start with 1 (padding memberships used to be the norm) so if there are 10,000+ you can assume there are lots of active members, or the site is very visible.
Can you bring your reputation with you? A site like Bonanzle or IOffer lets your eBay feedback travel with you, but smaller sites like alsoshop.com or hibidder.com will let you bring feedback scores from 10 other sites to their site. This will make or break you, as I can attest to. I had 10 customers in a year on a site with about 20,000 members, but with Bonanzle I have had many times that. It's also important to remember that unless you sell to a seller, you probably won't receive feedback from the customer, so your imported score becomes even more important.
A perfect example of a small success with social selling in the past was with a site called Wagglepop. Before I left the site after a string of disagreements with the owner, I was able to sell over $5,000 in 7 months. That's not a living by any means, but only 1 in 10 eBay sellers reach that in 7 months. I stuck with the community, helped other sellers, and marketed my store at the site and had some mild success.
A more recent example is on Bonanzle, where my sales in 2 years have barely reached the $5,000 from my 7 month Wagglepop stint (only about $100 of $5,300 came in the first year.) The difference is my activity in the community. I rarely chat with the other members, where I did with many of the Wagglepop members over the phone regularly. I don't really put my booth link anywhere, but with Wagglepop I had the link up everywhere I visited. In fact, my only sales are from Google's Shopping results, and only from there for the past year. Could I do better? Maybe, but I no longer have the free time I once had with Wagglepop.
That's it for social selling this weekend, and I hope this gets your feet wet on the topic.
