Well I am blogging in person today. Bizarre thing to say, what I mean is that I am not using a third party program to blog for me. Why? Because I want to put in some fancy pictures. Also I can't edit my post & my spelling & grammar leave a lot to be desired!
It is quite clear to me that in the UK at least there are many people still reading their Tweets but not so many Twittering. How have I come to this conclusion? Because I started Tweeting about 1/2 hr ago and received more click throughs than I sometimes get in 2 hours. There can be only 3 reasons for this. The first that my Tweets are becoming increasingly interesting ( I like this one best), the 2nd is my following has grown exponentially, (has not happened) & the last, which is also the most likely is that there are more following than Tweeting today!
You may be wondering why I have decided to post a picture of pink pants. Well, this icon represents clothes, shoes and accessories & post christmas marks the start of the sales!
Since I have experience of retail, both online & on the high street I know what a traumatic time this can be for independent retailers. Apart from the huge amount of work required to re-organise the whole shop, change the window to draw in the shoppers, You also need to decrease the prices in the shop, edit the prices online all to facilitate the new seasons stock due in Febuary. This is both in space & monetry terms.
Should the stock not sell, the budgets will be tight, the shop looks untidy & the customers stop coming as they see the same old things!
We used every resource we could. We used our website, the shop, we off loaded at big discounts in bulk to customers wishing to resell themselves & we used Ebay.
So why would we use Ebay when we had our own website, the answer is simply traffic. Our ratings were excellent but called for specific footfall. Ebay had the browsers who came across your products by accident.
We gained a massive following since we were selling last seasons designer names with honest appraisels of the condition of the stock. We did not reduce our prices for Ebay, in fact very often we were able to realise better prices purely because of the numbers. What was disenchanting was the costs.
There were list prices, extra picture prices, shop prices, final sellers fees and very often paypal costs. These prices have inflated so dramatically that Ebay stopped being a viable way to make money. In the end we just used it to clear out dead stock, which is no bad thing.
So if you have excess stock & need a viable place to sell it. Why not utilise the free sites available online. Many are as easy to use as Ebay, some display with picture galleries and some even do a better job at showcasing items than the market leaders.
Until next time, happy sales!
Yap Yap OK
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