We’ve been working on another business… it’s not another retail endeavor, but we’re very excited about it.
I truly miss retail. I find myself wandering the local stores and cleaning up their displays and merchandising for them. It’s built in, I can’t shut it off. I still have my website but I’ve been so neglectful. Even customers are writing to me giving me advice on how to spruce things up. I’m in denial.
I’ve sold on ebay since 1999. I sort of broke up with Ebay last spring when they stopped letting sellers leave feedback, raised their fees, cut back on power seller perks and generally told all of the small businesses to go to hell… but in a nice way. Donning my rose-colored glasses, I recently opened an Amazon.com shop, listed one thing and sold it almost immediately. I like the idea but wow, do they charge a lot for commission. This is how it works in a nutshell…
- Sign up and pick a store name. Give them your credit card and banking information, prove you are real. Voila, you’re in business
- A basic account is free but that means that you can only sell things that they are already selling. For example, if you are selling books, you find the book already listed and click “I have one of these to sell!”
- You list your item with a very short description. Less than one sentence to the effect of “Great condition, never used but has been opened”
- Amazon gives you a shipping allowance. They determine how much shipping is and give you that amount to cover shipping costs. I found that it is very conservative. Make sure to look into this, it could really bite you!
- When you sell your item, about a week or so later you can request a check for the amount due to you from the sale. That amount is the sale price minus about 15% plus your shipping allowance.
- If you want to sell things that aren’t listed on amazon.com already, you’ll have to get a premium account and pay a little extra per month for the privilege of adding your own new items to their ever-growing inventory
Again, it’s amazon selling 101 in a nutshell….but I was surprised that they were comparable to Ebay, as far as fees go, after you factor in Ebay’s purposely confusing multi-tiered fee system and paypal fees (Ebay has created a paypal monopoly recently, too. You have to use Paypal or your own merchant account. Period.). In my humble opinion, Amazon’s reputation is far superior to Ebay’s these days. But… that may be just me 
Ebay was good for the bargain and obscure item hunters. In this financial climate buyers are definitely looking for a bargain, but do you think they are searching for obscure treasures or items that remind them of their childhood? Ebay has a “hot list” showing which items are most searched for and which items are most purchased for any given month. I’m really curious… what’s been selling these days? Is Ebay still on top of their game after alienating their small business “work force”? Anywho…. there’s a good article regarding online shopping trends in 2009 via MSNBC…
Report: Online retail could reach $156B in 2009 by RACHEL METZ.
And Fortune magazine did an article about Amazon’s semi-recovery this January after a bleak holiday season. That’s promising.
I’ve never claimed I was a full fledged entrepreneur with a sharp business mind. I’ll say that again. My head is in merchandising, art, customer service and optimism (with a twist of bitchy)… not so much crunching numbers and writing business plans. Over the weekend, we met with the step-father of our business partner. He has started and sold multi-multi million dollar companies and he is quite brilliant. He openly admitted to sort of having a few false starts and stumbling his way through at least 10 other businesses, but a few really good decisions with his businesses have made him a wealthy man. It was fascinating to hear what he had to say. In short…S corps are tops, always have a business plan and never use the word “conservative”. Neat.
So, as we move forward with a non-glitzy online service business and I figure out how I’m going to re-do my online retail shop… I’m faced with all sort of questions. “Do I have the energy for this?!?” seems to top that list. Getting the momentum to move forward and keep it moving is an art in itself.
Some light reading… an article on customer service and Baby Boomers via newsfactor.com:
Boomers at Retail: A Cautionary Tale By Matt Thornhill
Retailers should view Circuit City as a cautionary tale. Media reports say that the self-inflicted mortal blow occurred back in 2007 when the company fired some 3,000 top-earning store sales people as a cost-cutting measure. Customer service did more than disappear: It got hired by Best Buy. Deep cuts in costs are de rigeur right now, but short-changing customer service could prove fatal.
On a personal note regarding that article… I worked in retail for a sporting good store for a number of years. At one point, management and the shareholders decided that their highly experienced, motivated and highly trained work force was too expensive and started cutting back hours to hire minimum wage workers. I watched our tight-knit group of co-workers leave one-by-one or get laid off abruptly. Some of them after being there over 20 years. We were a great group… outdoorsy and energetic skiers, runners, avid fishermen, campers, scuba divers etc etc. We loved sports and loved learning about the new equipment and it really shined through when we presented it to our customers. Our store was making the most net profit of any other store in the state (there were roughly 27 at the time). But, we were the first to start getting 15 and 16 year old kids with little to no sporting background to replace the “old timers” of 20+ years. It was completely evident that this new group didn’t care about selling sports-related items at all. For example, the first replacement in my department was a 16 year old pregnant girl with a beautiful display of hickeys on her neck and chest who dropped out of high school and was trying to get her GPA… God bless her. My first guess is that she hadn’t recently been in a pair of skis or enjoyed in-line roller skating on a regular basis. So, as sales started declining, management still didn’t think it had anything to do with their decision to shoo out the last generation of employees. First, the image of the business changed. More extreme and very “Mountain Dew”, if you catch my drift. Then, the salespeople on the floor were required to wear fluorescent yellow vests. That failed to revive the declining sales, too. One of my friends worked at the corporate headquarters and I got the latest scoop for years, but he left after getting fed up as well. I’m SO glad to hear that customer service is still paramount to a successful business. I know the owner started this business by wanting the latest and greatest skiing equipment, and a knowledgeable, passionate and ski-centric staff to run it… funny how that changed and funny how it could very well kill their little empire. Makes me chuckle just a wee bit because they sort of deserve it.
So, I won’t get my retail store until at least 2010… but at least I’m not stuck in a long lease, like so many. So many small shops are closing… it really breaks my heart. And something I never thought of… with all this retail closing, who is paying sales tax?
As the economy continues to tank, and as consumers tighten their grip on spending, there are fewer and fewer pennies flowing from shopping malls to cities, resulting in dramatic shortfalls in sales tax revenue — “the bread and butter” of general city funds. If a consumer spends a dollar and is charged 8 cents sales tax, cities generally get a penny of that.
And I betcha most cities were planning their budgets based on prior, golden years. Smart. Very smart.
And lastly… more projections from Bloomberg for retail and Walmart. This year’s forecast calls for more doom and gloom. Go team.