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My Long Journey to Successful Selling on the Internet [Part 2 of 2]
By: Paul Wenke
Courtesy Of: E-Myth
03. Jul. 2008
[Paul Wenke has been an E-Myth Client since October 2005, and graduated from the Mastery Impact! Business Coaching program in December 2006.]
As I detailed in Part 1 of my story, I started an online business called Hardware Overstock without implementing any of the E-Myth principles. The result was that we had spent a great deal of time, energy and money building something that would have to be rebuilt. When we went back and consulted the E-Myth lessons we had used in building our bricks-and-mortar business, we had a clear understanding of where we had failed.
My original objective for our new bricks-and-clicks business on eBay was simply to sell products on the Internet, and that's as far as it went. While that was an objective, it was not a Strategic Objective, and that's the crucial difference.
So we started over, and began with the process of developing our Strategic Objective, where we answered the following questions:
1. What line of business were we going to be in? A hardware store has a wide variety of products of different sizes, shapes, purposes, and functions. Did we want to sell all of them online? Could we sell all of them? Could we ship all of them? Would all of them be profitable? As we began to study these questions, we realized we couldn't sell everything in our store on the Internet. Some things were too large to ship, some wouldn't be profitable, and some were actually unsafe or illegal to sell in this fashion. As a result of this process, we developed and codified some rules for what was to be listed.
2. What were our size and growth objectives? We deliberated about how big we wanted to be, and realized that we could have as many products in our Internet store as we wanted as long as we could find reliable sources of quality products - and we now have sources for over 600,000 products. Given this large number, we then defined the critical data elements of the products that needed to be tracked and automated and developed a list of rules that would govern and manage our inventory online. With these rules in hand, we chose a consulting group and a software company with experience in Internet businesses that could help us to build our online systems.
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