Selling online
ecommercematt: Assumptions:
They have limited funds. They lack the ability make a presentable site based on one of the many open source commerce platforms. Their lack of skill (and presumably cash, too) prevents them from gaining traction with Google Adwords and/or equivalent(s).This leaves public marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, Overstock, Etsy, etc.eBay and Etsy sound like the best options. Etsy will be good because of its focus on small, handcrafty items. eBay will be good because of the sheer size of its user base. I don't have any experience with Etsy, but I'm assuming it is similar to eBay in many ways. The key to success with eBay is to not just pick what you want to sell and list it and hope for the best. Instead you need to spend time analyzing how other people are selling identical and similar items. What are they titling them? When are they scheduling the auctions? Are they bundling multiple items? How long are their auctions? Fixed price? eBay store?Analyze the hell out of your competition, and experiment. You can use one of the bulk listing and schedule management tools like Turbo Lister, but you'll likely want to record information in Excel (or equivalent) and start parsing what's going on. The improvement yielded by careful analysis and experimentation over simply listing what you want to sell is tremendous. The people who succeed on eBay by selling a lot of items have optimized their strategy based on detailed research. They don't simply use custom html templates for their auctions, and diligently respond to customer inquiries. They analyze everything to death and adjust their methods based on what they learn from their extensive analysis.