Investing in yourself. Lessons from 25 years selling online.

I recently wrapped up selling the bulk of my in-house inventory this year on eBay. I had moved it from Bonanza, where sales and traffic had basically died off to nothing, and found success at my old nemesis eBay. 

Once that was completed, I decided to try to build a different product line and source CDF, and keep little to no inventory in stock. I have a large network of suppliers who will dropship a large variety of products, so I decided this would be best to move forward with on Bonanza. I am not looking at is as income, but more or less as a project to keep me active in ecommerce.

However, when I returned to Bonanza and began to plan and rebuild, I hit a roadblock. The site owner decided to triple the sale fees and institute a listing fee. Now, on a site like eBay where I sold 20% of what was listed every 30 days, that was fine. On a site like Bonanza where I had dropped from 10% sell through monthly to about 2% before leaving, that is not acceptable.

This reminded my about an old friend online named Joe, who preached the gospel of "invest in yourself." He taught me how to use the marketplace sites like eBay, Amazon, Etsy, etc, to gain customers, then convert them into my customers on my own website. 

For instance, imagine you sell a really awesome countertop dishwasher at a competitive price. You've setup your product pages on your site with a personal demo video, made youtube and instagram shorts about it, and even sold a handful but want to grow. How? You have to buy advertising. So, let's say you spent $100 on Facebook ads. You may get about a 10% conversion rate if you're lucky, out a minimum of $100 in costs and possible not even breaking even to acquire those customers. Now, look at eBay, where you pay 15% of the sale (added into your price) and maybe a store fee monthly, and can acquire those customers and offer them 15% lower prices on your website with a flyer in their package. Which one makes more business sense?

The problem with marketplaces as a long term strategy is that you really are at their mercy. I've had Amazon restrict my account for months because they thought I was selling knock-offs. I've had eBay freeze my funds for months because my sales suddenly spiked for a few months. I've been on marketplaces that just shut down with little warning... Gemm and Second Spin come to mind. 

The beauty of having your own website is that won't happen. It can if you forget to pay the hosting bill, but most likely if you use a reputable service, it won't.

I personally am enjoying rebuilding on Square right now. It is actually a 100% free webstore platform that offers everything needed to get started. There are upgrades which cost about $20 a month to get, but they really aren't necessary. It comes across clean on mobile browsers which is necessary, and offers many free apps to feed to search and shopping engines. 

Look at how I'm getting started: https://gravityvideoshop.square.site/

If you'd like to give it a try, it's 100% free. Go to Square