Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Damn It

Damn Chinese completely ruined ebay for us small sellers. I went to see if selling like 10 phones on ebay was worth it, but they are selling these phones for the same prices that I pay. That makes the effort and profit so totally not worth it.

Then, over of iOffer all I get are people who ask me if I ship to (insert foreign country here). This means I have to log in just to say "No" because they can't read the part that says USA Only.

Of course, CraigsList isn't much better. I can't tell you how many called I get for a Nokia N97, when the list clearly says "Not a Nokia Product".

Monday, September 21, 2009

Google Sucks Now Too

Google has gotten into the game of shutting down my abilities to make money. Earlier, I had posted about how multiple websites for the same items is bad. Well, that put me in their cross-hairs and they took notice of little ol' me. I was shut off Google Base for several days. After making a stink about find out WHY I was blacklisted, it turns out that I sell iphone copies. Blah, blah, blah... what-EVER. I think I sell like 2 a year off the site. Get over it people. It's not that big of a deal.

I swear, I would have less hassle if I sold drugs on the corner. The phones work as advertised. At no point do I say APPLE, so what's the problem? Ebay used to get on my ass about it. So I removed them. Then it was watch phones. So I removed them. Then it was Sony, so I removed them all and closed my ebay store. And I am quite happier without their fees... fuck you very much.

Oh, yeah... so what did I do about this google garbage? Shit, that was easy. I just opened a new free account. Problem solved. I had thought about complaining some more, but I figured that would only cause more trouble.

In fact, I am thinking that soon I will need to open a new website to compete with my exisiting one. This way, if one has this crap again, the other will still bring in money.

It appears that Google Base was good for about 60-80 clicks, and 1-3 sales per day. Given that is free, the odds are not too bad.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Yellow Page Listings

Holy FUCK... don't ever sign up for those free listings unless you want to get bombarded by telemarketers who want to sell you ad listings.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Cool Tool

This looks terribly useful.

http://craigslistadtracker.com/

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Google Base

I was trying to get my ioofer feed onto google, but as it turns out, they will not allow the same store with 2 locations. So, mental note: create a second and third company for the whole google base thing.

Big Client

I landed a huge order witha new client today. It's one of those dream orders. It is a big computer sales company, who's customers involve government contracts. They needed a bunch of phones, and the guy calls one company and while they could do the job, the salesman wasn't so great. Then he calls me (number at the top of the website) and by the end of the call, I had him sold. After I confirm that everything he needed was possible, in the time frame he needed, he proceeds to pay for a $12,000 order of 50 phones. My profit on that was..... well.... a lot.

It's funny how things go sometimes. After I did a complete breakdown of how long I epected the whole order to take me to take from beginning to end, then added in my profit per phone, so that I had a number I was happy with. Then, thinking about how you should always aim high.... I doubled the profit margin, added some extra just for the hell of it, and sent the proposal. He accepted it without even much looking at it. He just marked it up again and sent it to his customer, who OK'ed it within 10 minutes. I was floored. See? Always ask for more than you expect, you just may get it.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

How to get more from your blog

I am currently reading about "How to get more from yopur blog" and it says to get comments, I should simply... ask for them. Hmm... let's see if that works.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Credit Card Fraud

I get a ton of Credit Card fraud. I have no idea how automated systems with hundreds of orders are able to keep up with it all. I mean, when they are wrong, it is usually pretty obvious, but how does a company like Walmart online even know? Does anyone even care?

Thursday, September 10, 2009

How it Should always be

I had gone to the beach for the first time in 21 years. My wife dragged me. I was there about 20 minutes when my blackberry announced I had email. Upon checking it, I saw that I sold a phone. Nice.

iOffer

So, I just finished setting up my items on iOffer.com. The good news, is that it worked. Bad news, is that it was not as expected. the HTML had issues, and now I keep getting emails asking the same dumb question "Does this phone work on (insert service here)."
On the plus side, I can have it submit to Google Base and Google Analytics.

I take that back. The Analytics does not seem to be seem properly, and the Base Feed has the wrong URL attached to each item. Fucking Balls.... it's always something.

Blogger Buddy

I added a Widget to Windows 7 that lets me simply type in a little window and push send. Maybe this will improve getting my random thoughts sent to the masses (all 5 of you). Of course... I don't have anything to say right now.

Local Listings

It appears that when you register your company with these free local listing sites like yellowpages.com, magicyellow.com etc... some add you without further contact. Some want email verification. All that is fine, but then you get the ones that call to "verify" but all they look to do is upsell you on advertising. Then if you say no, of course, want to know why you don't want your business to succeed?

I had listed 2 of my companies where I am looking to get local customers, so these yahoo's (another company that just called, by the way) think that it's OK to call me up and bother me.

In my experience, paid advertising does NOT work. I mean, it will make sales and all, and drive traffic, but if I gotta pay them now too, where is MY profit? I'm better off with free, then get what I can get. It's like, why pay eBay all those dumb assed fees? They are making money, not me.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

eCrater Sucks

They do not accept HTML, which makes the 600+ detailed descriptions for my items useless. I decide to go with Title and Description being the same text, thinking that any listing is better than no listing. After waiting several days to have my listings approved, they were denied. After sending an email asking for help, and specifying that they were making the wrong decision based on my images, they simply sent me a canned response that did not help, or even answer the question. So I sent them this:

Thank you for not fully reading my question, answering with a canned response, and not helping in any way. I can see that the rumors are true about the poor service on eCrater. I do not sell on ebay either because of their poor seller policies as well. I will simply take my business elsewhere.

iOffer.com accepted my listings WITH the HTML code, and no complaints.
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