Continue doing business via online auction like you've always done, and you're likely to see both your sales and your profits shrink. It's change or perish; you have to change the way you do business to survive.
The following excerpt from online business expert Michael Miller's book, "Selling Online 2.0: Migrating From eBay To Amazon, Craigslist, And Your Own E-Commerce Web Site," is presented by bMighty courtesy of the Que Publishing imprint of Pearson Education.
BOOK EXCERPT:
"Selling Online 2.0" -- Chapter 2: Planning For Selling Success
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| By Michael Miller Published By Que ISBN-10: 0-7897-3974-7 ISBN-13: 978-0-7897-3974-2 | |
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If you're a small or medium-sized eBay seller, you're no doubt feeling the squeeze. Continue doing business via online auction like you've always done, and you're likely to see both your sales and your profits shrink. It's change or perish; you have to change the way you do business to survive.
More About "Selling Online 2.0":
Before you change your business model, however, you need to plan for the change. Without careful planning, you're liable to make the wrong changes and end up worse off than you were previously. Planning is key to building a successful business—even if you've already tasted success on eBay.
Planning for Life Beyond eBay Auctions
Here's a fact I really don't like to admit: In the past, it's been possible to obtain short-term success on eBay without doing a whole lot of planning beforehand. I hate to admit this because I am, by nature, a planner, and I know the value of planning when building a successful business of any kind. But eBay auctions, in the past, were just too easy to do, and many sellers found themselves making lots of money without actually planning for it. Put another way, it was easy to get lucky.
That was the past, of course; going forward, it's going to be much, much harder to build a lasting business based solely on eBay online auctions. Luck won't factor into things as much; building a next-generation online business will require planning and skill and probably a little financing—the same things required to build any other type of successful business. In other words, you need to know what you're going to do before you actually do it.
That means thinking through all your options, doing a little research, and then sitting down and writing a detailed plan for how to achieve what you want to achieve. You have to do your homework and figure out where you want to go and how you're going to get there.
If you don't plan your next moves in advance, chances are you'll run into more than a few surprises. Unpleasant surprises. You don't want to get six months into your business and then find out that you're losing money on every sale you make. Far better to think through everything beforehand, so you'll know what to expect. No surprises—that's my motto.
Asking—and Answering—Key Questions
The easiest way to begin the planning process is to ask yourself a series of questions. When you can comfortably answer these questions, you'll have the framework of your business plan—and a roadmap for how to implement the necessary changes to ensure the continued survival and success of your business.
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