Why to avoid Ebay
Our first atempt at starting a microbusiness was a
learning opportunity. We decided to sell some of the native
plants on our 58 acre farm on Ebay, figuring that all it would cost us
would be a few seller's fees and a bit of postage. We made a bit
of money --- which was much appreciated at the time --- but in
retrospect, we should have run the microbusiness very differently.
The problem with Ebay
from a microbusiness perspective is that buyers expect to get a really
good deal, so you need to undercut all of your competitors to make a
sale. We had to drop our prices to rock bottom, meaning that we
were barely making minimum wage on the time we spent packaging plants
and taking them to the post office. Added onto that was the
buyers' mentality --- after spending a mere $2 on a plant, they were
pissed off if it arrived wilted.
In retrospect, we should
have sold our plants through our own website and spent money on
advertising (and search engine optimization) to bring customers to
us. Then we should have found a way to make our products more
unique in some way. But we learned a lot from the experience, and
our next microbusiness product went much better!
To read more about our
experience developing our microbusiness, check out our ebook.
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