Starting out on eBay
Hi
We started doing online selling as a laugh. We had just built a kitchen in our house and found we had a carousel left over. So I sold it on eBay thinking it would never sell. Much to our surprise it sold. The effort to post it was enormous it took hours to get securely packaged and posted.
So what could we sell now first we tried batteries? We played about with prices until they started selling not even thinking about the profit or in this case loss. But we sold them and we learned so much. How to deal with lost items, late deliveries, how not to post items and most important about making a loss. The mistakes we made have stood us in such good stead we learned so much.
We read books about selling and did a course on bookkeeping – highly recommended it helps so much with all the terms the accountants use and it makes using on line accounting packages so easy. It also taught us the need to keep accounts up to date and to talk to your accountant.
In the meantime we were posting about 2 or 3 parcels a day at the Post Office and hoping for the big break of 5 parcels in one day. We tried sun glasses they sold like mad and then stopped selling never worked out why. Then we tried cosmetics and have never looked back.
We found a wholesaler and went to visit them very naive asked the wrong questions, and bought something that actually sold very well complete accident.
We contacted Royal Mail and they set us up with an account no more standing in these huge queues people now stare at us as we walk straight to the counter.
Finding suppliers was great fun we made lots of mistakes and even went to a Trade Fair what fun that was. Then came our biggest break I was made redundant. My world came crashing down the Government had cancelled our contract. To me it was the end of the world no work, and the company I worked for treated us very badly, it was heart breaking. But I threw myself into our business and started to build the infrastructure of the business. I attended every free meeting I could find and started to find our business was in quite good shape we even wrote a business plan, and did our profit and loss. We found out later we had written a profit and loss account that was making a loss. For the next three months we worked like mad getting a business put in place and looking for a job at the same time.
We got invited three accountants around to tell us how good they were. Two came no problem and both were very good the third one kept on cancelling appointments eventually we just gave up and went with the best accountant. Gordon sold himself by listening and giving advice and telling us how good they were.
We set up a web site through a company and we were ripped off they seemed excellent on the surface but later we found out that they charged a lot of money for not a lot. Plus they were developing their software based on the Customers requirements. We were introduced to a software guy who produced fantastic software for a quarter of the price and to a far higher quality. We met a software team at a show that we thought sounded okay, we got a quote of £80 a month to maintain the software. We are still waiting for the feedback as to what it is for. Our new web site will go live next week and it will replace our existing one http://rejuvenatedcosmetics.com
We had SEO done by a recommended person it cost us less than £500 and not only was it good but it worked. We have had offers of £500 a month to get you to the first page of Google. Keep on reading about SEO and join Linkedin and get into the SEO Groups and not only do you meet interesting people but you find some very good advice for free.
We have expanded since we first started and are growing steadily but its hard work but good fun. We were asked so many questions about how we had done this we set up a company to teach people and companies how to sell and to sell items for companies and private individuals you can find it at http://www.araide.co.uk we are starting to get enquiries and we have courses running.
Its all good fun but its hard work and well worth it. Thanks for reading and feel free to leave comments or ask questions below.
