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My Long Journey to Successful Selling on the Internet [Part 1 of 2]
By: Paul Wenke
Courtesy Of: E-Myth
26. Jun. 2008
[Paul Wenke has been an E-Myth Client since October 2005, and graduated from the Mastery Impact! Business Coaching program in December 2006.]
My wife and I own an ACE hardware store in a small town located high in the remote Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Colorado - a beautiful area with a population of only about 4,000 people in the whole county. Our business philosophy has been to stock a wide variety of products to meet as many of our customer's needs as possible.
Like all retailers, we have some products that don't sell very well, or don't sell at all. But, because of our business philosophy and remote location, it's even more difficult to get these "dead" products out of the store. We have tried different methods, such as displaying them in different places and marking them down in price and, if they still don't sell, putting them in an auction (where we are lucky if we get 25% of our original costs back).
I hate this kind of dead inventory because it represents dead money — money that's not working for me. It's money I could use to expand, to pay debt, to put in another product line or to pay for a nice vacation. A few years ago I got the idea of selling this dead inventory on eBay. I thought that, at a minimum, it would expand my potential customer base, and maybe some of this dead stuff would sell. That idea led to what would turn out to be a very interesting journey.
The start of the dream - building our eBay store.
I introduced my new idea to the management team, which includes my wife. Their polite enthusiasm conveyed their unspoken thoughts of: "Uh oh, here he goes again." Well, I wasn't deterred. After all, what did they know about eBay? Of course, I didn't really know much about eBay, either. Still, I was convinced it would work. So this is how I started - with a "ready, shoot, aim approach." It definitely wasn't an E-Myth approved method, but I decided to go for it anyway.For those of you who have never used eBay to either buy or sell something, it is truly an amazing experience. First, the entire company is being run by extremely talented, creative people who have a lot of energy. Second, over 200 million people use eBay to buy and sell an incredibly broad array of products and services. It is an enormous marketplace — if eBay were a country it would be the fifth most populous in the world. Third, over 60% of all Internet sales are made through eBay. Fourth, Internet sales have experienced double digit increase in year over year sales for the past five years.
The first thing we did was select a name for our eBay store. We called it Hardware Overstock. Once we had the name selected, we listed an item for sale. And while we were listing our second and third items, the first item sold! I rushed to my wife's office and told her the exciting news. She said something like, "That's nice, Dear." Why didn't she understand that this would change life as we knew it?
Stay tuned for Part Two!
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