After all the failures from last month, I'm feeling pretty good right about now. I have admitted several times that I doubted my decision to leave eBay, but with the latest string of announcements there, I'm very glad I got out when I did. Maybe eBay will shock me further and actually improve over time. I continue to read the eBay boards and find that many sellers are still holding their own with sales there and with adjusting their Store items to meet eBay's new demands. I also noticed a higher number of sellers expressing the need to find new venues or to build their own websites. Good luck to us all!
As I mentioned last time, I signed up to sell on Barnes & Noble. I am very happy to say that I sold my first book on B&N within
hours of listing there. Having listed less than 20 books at that point, I'm glad I took the steps to enroll. Here's the
application page
for those of you that may have missed it before.
I'm really enjoying this process of listing for a change - and tweaking my listings for my own purposes, rather than to satisfy eBay's whims, or to conform to a listing style such as eCrater's or Buy It Sell It (which I signed up for but have really not delved into). I've read a bit more about tab-delimited files and Excel. Seems there are some really helpful people on the BISI boards. They find that Excel gives them a corrupted file that can be fixed in notepad. What's up with that? Been through it a few times, and I don't have the energy to test this further right now. I need a viable selling venue that does not require a huge learning curve.
On that note, I have been reluctant to list more items on eCrater, as I've been busy looking for even more places to sell.
On the positive side, I can see by studying my Google analytics which items are being searched by specific keywords. I believe
that very rare, or unusual items (such as my yearbook listings) will do especially well there, and after my excel fiasco I'm
not too keen on building a completely separate database for the books I already have listed in HomeBase. It just doesn't make
sense to do so. I do not intend to close out my eCrater stores, but I do need to take some time to get my oddball items that were
lated for auction prepared for listing. Rather than auctioning them on eBay, I may park these in one of my eCrater stores and let
Google handle the eyeballs. If I get really antsy, I may try some auctions at
Wensy.
(More about Wensy below).
I must repeat that one of my eCrater stores geared to send lookers to another venue has proved to increase sales at that venue. I mentioned this in my last article as well, and I like to think of it as gateway web page sales in reverse. Use an eCrater store for the keywords you can generate, and send lookers to one of your already established selling sites. Remember, you can create multiple storefronts, and it won't cost you anything but a bit of your time.
Barnes & Noble is Sweet Relief
With roughly $2 take home minimum per book, I expect I can float recent popular fiction at B&N for a slow but steady income. B&N reminds me of Half.com without all the eBay-inspired headaches that come with the venue. On day two of listing at B&N, I sold another book there. Mind you, I am listing books that I had in my bulk lot and or donate piles. These are common paperbacks that were more than likely destined for the thrift store. I may not sell the bulk of them, but I don't mind listing them for a free and easy look-see.
