WIN Meeting 10.10.06

 

Janelle Meeting Minutes

Announcements:

Starting now, we’re doing 6 month updates. By this time all the group suggestions are probably implemented and you’re ready for the next level of suggestions. Anyone who has presented in the past will be on the schedule for updates in upcoming meetings.
  
Janelle is embarking on a 10-day multi-city tour and will be out of touch for a couple of weeks.
  
Ladies who launch is scheduled for 10/26. This is a “take-no-prisoners” approach to women’s business networking. Register early because they sell out quickly.

  • LWL has an incubator for women to present business ideas to the group for feedback and mentorship.

  • Same organizer as the Crave Parties. Next Crave Party is in Vancouver, BC. Great speakers scheduled for that weekend.

Powerseller meeting is tonight. We will work on the “My World” paper and take a close look at everyone’s store.

  

New Introductions:

  • Myrna Hoffman joins the group today. Myrna is the owner of Ooz&Oz, a nationally recognized toy based on a 1000 year old concept. Myrna won Oprah’s new business owner award and many other toy awards. She is excited to join a women’s business networking community and is looking to discuss sales opportunities for her products. Myrna demonstrated her product, based on an anamorphoscope for the group.

Exciting News & Updates:

  • Laura has a new site that is very impressive. Her about me page is launched too, and her writing is great in tone and the page well optimized for search engines. She’s starting to do sourcing now and is looking for products to market in the store.

  • Rebecca is out today due to illness. She wanted to remind everyone that when we run ourselves too hard and fall ill then we are unable to care for all the obligations we were trying to keep up with in the first place. Strive for balance in your lives.

Retailing 101 by Carol Hearn:

  • Carol entered retailing in high school when she sold toys and candy at the local Sears store. Eventually she opened her own store, but had no business background at all and many expensive and frustrating learning experiences. Beginning this month Carol will be presenting basic retailing concepts to the group based on her experience.

  • We make our profits on products when we buy, not when we sell. Whatever you do, you can’t get away from the fact that if you pay too much for the items you sell you won’t make any money. Its important to be hard-headed about what we spend for items we plan to resell. This forces us to be creative about where we source our product lines.

  • Keystone prices refers to the rule of thumb that the acquisition price of an item for resale should be no more than 50% of the expected resale price. This ratio is sound in that it takes into account the costs of selling and a reasonable profit margin. Of course we can always try to buy the products initially for under 50% retail, but most of the time this pricing structure is only available to very large orders.

  • Triple Key pricing means that the retail price is 3x the wholesale price.

  • eBay has changed expectations about traditional Keystone Pricing. Many eBay retailers purchase their products at substantial discounts and at double that price they are able to offer prices that are still only 20-30% over wholesale prices to small sellers like us. This is why it’s so difficult to compete with the big boys on pricing.

  • Selling expenses for items sold on eBay are so much lower than comparable expenses in Brick and Mortar stores. Online sales simply do not need a high a gross sales price to generate the same net profit.

  • For example, a book is available for a wholesale price of $7 each. The brick and mortar price for this book is $15. The actual eBay sales price will probably be around $10. The profit to the eBay seller and the brick and mortar seller are likely equal but the expense structure for each seller is different.

  • Can products be found for less than ½ the eBay sales price? YES. One strategy for this is to buy used. There are tradeoffs to this because used items are one of a kind and are more labor-intensive to market. A unique photo, description and listing must be created for each item.

  • Carol will present a topic at each meeting. If anyone has suggestions for topics please email her.

Carol's Notes (by Carol Hearn - WanderingCreekAntiques.com)
   

How to point to a particular page (group of items) in an auction description:

  • Click on ADVANCED SEARCH near the search box on any ebay page.

  • In left hand pane, click on Items by Seller.

  • Enter your seller name in the box that says Enter Seller’s User ID. Do not check any of the small boxes, and enter.

  • On the search results page, you can either choose a category in the left hand pane, or you can enter a word or group of words in the search box that you know will appear in the titles of the items you want to display.

  • When you see the page of items on the screen, highlight the url, which is what you’ll copy to your auction description.

This can be used to narrow your results down to very specific items. For example, if I want to see all the Dept 56 items I have listed, I’d enter 56. That way I’ll get all the Dept 56 items regardless of whether the title says Dept 56 or Department 56. If I want to show all the Wallace Rosepoint items I have listed, I might not remember if I listed the items as Rosepoint or as Rose Point, so I’d enter in the search box +(rosepoint,”rose point”).

Here’s an ebay page that shows the various ways to refine your searches to get exactly the results you want:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/find/search_commands.html 
  

  
How to cover up an underlying link with more user-friendly text:

This is the link to my Dept 56 items: http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sofocus=bs&sbrftog=1&frpp=25&from=R10&satitle=56&sacat=-1%26catref%3DC6&ftrt=1&ftrv=1&saprclo=&saprchi=&seller=1&sass=wanderingcreekantiques&fsop=3%26fsoo%3D2&coaction=compare&copagenum=1&coentrypage=search&fgtp= 

I want it to look like this in a listing:
Click here to see my other Dept 56 items.

Here’s the format to use IN HTML VIEW:
<A href="http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sofocus=bs&amp;sbrftog

=1&amp;frpp=25&amp;from=R10&amp;satitle=56&amp;sacat=-1%26catref%

3DC6&amp;ftrt=1&amp;ftrv=1&amp;saprclo=&amp;saprchi=&amp;seller=

1&amp;sass=wanderingcreekantiques&amp;fsop=3%26fsoo%3D2&amp;coaction

=compare&amp;copagenum=1&amp;coentrypage=search&amp;fgtp=">

Click here to see all my Dept 56 items.</A>
 

  
How to insert pictures in your listing without paying ebay:

NOTE: The first picture is free, so it’s a good idea to use it, but there’s no reason to pay ebay picture services for additional pictures. You can very easily put additional pictures in your listings without paying ebay.
First, find a hosting service. Your ISP probably gives you free space to store things like pictures as part of your monthly fee. AOL, Verizon, and most other providers do this. To use your space, you have to know how to get your pictures into that space (usually using a program called FTP, which is part of Windows) and what their url is. For example, when I FTP a picture to my verizon space, it’s address will look like this: http://mysite.verizon.net/res0gekr/filename.jpg. You have to have this address in order to insert your picture into the description box in your auction.

If you don’t have free space with your internet service or can’t figure out how to access it (sometimes the instructions are hard to find and follow), you can always use a free picture hosting service like photobucket. To find free hosting services, google FREE PICTURE HOSTING SERVICE, and you’ll get a long list of them. Most hosting services let you copy your files directly from your hard drive to their storage space without using FTP (similar to the way ebay’s picture hosting works). After storing your pictures at the hosting site, you’ll have a url that looks like this: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v220/albumname/specificfilename.jpg

Once you have the url of the picture you want to put in your auction, the format is very simple. 
Format: <img src="http:addressofyourpicture.jpg">
The last section of this ebay page addresses this: http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/html_tips.html 

   

  

Mastermind:

  

Homework this month will include two masterminds. Comments for Alice and Shirley’s Mastermind sheet.

  

Shirley’s Mastermind:

  • Shirley’s Mastermind Outline is available here

  • Download Shirley’s Mastermind Sheet here

Shirley’s Background Info:

  • Shirley is experimenting with selling jewelry on eBay. She has been noticing at trade shows that all jewelry booths are positively packed with customers.

Shirley’s Mastermind:

  • Starting with high-end silver jewelry items.

  • She will also market holiday ornaments, lotions and other small items to generate traffic into the store and get people to notice the jewelry.

  • She plans to ship a free gift with each order, either a lotion sample or a jewelry cleaning cloth.

  • She is modeling her shipping model after Zappos, offering free shipping both ways for jewelry purchases.

  • Goal is to make $100 profit/day.

Shirley’s Questions:

  • Please refer to her outline.

Group suggestions:

  • Add “Sofie Rain” to the title of the eBay store in addition to the keywords.

  • Currently, Sofie Rain is not correctly redirected to the eBay store.

  • SEO on the About Me page looks good.

  • Do some research on competing products on eBay and see where your product falls in the price range on completed sales. For instance, a search on sterling silver earrings will bring back 20,000 items. Further investigation will show that most of those items never received a single bid. Try including a brand name in the store items to attract traffic.

  • Try a niche like “cowboy jewelry” or “butterfly earrings”. That sometimes brings in more traffic with specific niche items.

  • Consider a separate store for high-end items.

  • Include the word “kitsch” in the item title or description.

  • Holiday themed jewelry is very popular, so that might be a good niche.

  • Titles are the key to bringing in traffic. “Turquoise Pendant” is too general and brings back too many listings. Try “multi-color”, “large”, “huge”. Use keyword searches to determine the best title keywords.

  • The store photos are quite good (Shirley uses SharpPics).

  • The store name is not related to jewelry at all. Consider a store name that connotes jewelry in some sense.

  • Try theming the store around events and/or holidays.

  • Include multiple views of each product, including one that shows the sterling stamp, and possibly even one with a ruler or coin next to the item to give an idea of scale.

  • On the Sofie Rain About Me page has CalTrends text on it.

Alice Mastermind Update:

  • Alice passed around a summary sheet of the suggestions she has implemented and her goals for the next 6 months.

  • Alice reported that a Google search on her products yielded her listings in the top four slots.

  • She credits writing reviews and guides and daily blog entries.

  • Alice is now using Seller Manager Pro and saving quite a bit of time on her listings.

  • Now starting to promote needle arts and finding it’s a quite different type of product to sell than the quilting items.

  • Alice is fairly satisfied with Auctiva as an auction management tool. Her favorite feature is that she can include more photos for free.

  • Alice is still working out her accounting system and is planning to purchase a laptop and Quickbooks accounting software so she can get a clearer picture of her profits.

  • Alice is still planning to re-organize as a corporation.

  • Plans for a dedicated office space are proceeding, though slowly. The basement is earmarked for this purpose and undergoing improvements right now.

  • Alice is considering an ebay consulting business as well, goaskalice.com

Smart Women Finish Rich, 12 Commandments:

  • Rina is good at writing and feels she has an “every person” viewpoint. She has a unique sense of style, and often senses trends before they become mainstream. If she had $20M, she would cook more, find the perfect gift for someone, she would entertain more, she would hire someone to do household chores such as laundry, dishes, bookkeeping, cleaning. If she only had three years to live she would travel more, live in Israel, attend more cultural events and connect with nature more.

  • Laura is good at keeping focused on track, working with others and networking. If she had $20M, she would read more or invest in a bookstore. She would stop housecleaning. If she had only three years to live, she would travel with her family more, attend artist retreats and immerse herself in things she is interested in. People tell her that she is organized, balanced, a caring and nurturing parent.

  • Alice has put a lot of thought into delegating work she shouldn’t be doing. This is a challenge when we work out of our homes.

  • Many of us struggle with control issues when considering hiring someone else to do tasks for us such as housecleaning. There is a certain amount of vulnerability we all experience in letting someone else take care of things for us. Will they do it the same way as we do? Will they meet our standards?

Taming Your Inner Brat:

  • Homework was the first seven chapters.

  • Rina found the content to be very general in tone. The information appears to be aimed at professionals and not laypeople.

  • Carol found the author’s viewpoint to be interesting, but a little too artificial.

  • Janelle’s goal in assigning this book for business was to create an awareness of how much we care about other people’s opinions of us vs. how much time we spend in activities to grow our businesses. How many conflicting messages are we setting ourselves up with? How often are we setting goals and taking no actions to work toward them?

I Rock:

  • Janelle passed out hardback books to use as our I Rock! Journals

  • Our first entry in the book is to write our name on the first page and underneath write “I Rock Because…”

  • Next the books are passed around to each person in the group so that each member can write an I Rock! Message in each other’s book.

  • Write daily in this journal, at least three things.

Homework:

  • Finish reading Taming Your Inner Brat

  • Write in the I Rock journal daily, at least three entries

  • Finish reading Smart Women Finish Rich

  • Shirley’s Mastermind recommendations.