Well, E-bay must have caught on to my plans, because this March was undoubtedly the most difficult and anxiety ridden month I have had for a long time. Almost overnight, my sales on E-bay dropped to a trickle, even though I was continuing to list new material and nothing had changed in my customer base. I decided to test a few of my theories about E-bay hiding my listings again, just to make sure that I was not paranoid.
What I did was I went to incognito mode in Chrome and went to E-bay from there and searched for my items without logging in. While I did not see any evidence at that moment of my listings being hidden, I did notice that the appearance of my listings was different that what I was seeing when I am logged into E-bay. For one thing, when I was not logged in, I could not see my user name or feedback rating on any of my listings. It would show that I was a top rated seller, but other than that, if you were a buyer searching on E-bay, you wouldn't know one seller's listings from another until you click on it. That was a new thing that just came into effect, as I don't recall seeing it before. That might explain why a very large chunk of my E-bay sales for March came from new customers.
It was nerve wracking to see the magnitude of the slowdown. It was very noticeable, and felt almost as if the powers that be at E-bay had flipped a switch and just stopped showing my listings. Fortunately, I had enough offline sales from my established customers that we still did just over $4,500 in sales - not as good as last March, when we sold the Canada #2, but as good otherwise.
This was a remarkable month in other ways. Most importantly, it was the month when I began to execute my plan in earnest, to finally get out from under E-bay's death grip once and for all. It started with me designing and printing a brochure for all my customers, which clearly explained the benefits of shopping on my new website, as opposed to E-bay. I coupled that with a letter that I carefully crafted, which would go out to all my customers, explaining my decision to leave E-bay, and to explain the benefits of the new website. Here is a copy of it:
I am pretty proud of this. It took me several afternoons of writing, and rewriting to come up with copy that I was happy with. But in the end, I was extremely pleased with the result. Vistaprint had a 50% off sale that week, so when I was done, I was able to print 1,000 of these, and 1,000 new business cards for less than $400.
I realized though that as good as the brochure looked, I needed a way to gauge how many of my customers are actually going to come to my website, or at least express the intention of doing so. But how could I entice them to actually reach out and call, or send an e-mail? I thought about it long and hard, and finally it hit me: I need to offer them a real incentive. I thought about the standard 10% off your first order that a lot of places give. Then I thought, nah, this is not enough of an incentive to convince people to act - no I need something more compelling. Why not give them most of the savings that would come from not paying final value fees to E-bay? Beat E-bay at their own game. So I decided to offer any customer who registers with me before July 31, 2018, an extra 5% discount on any order they place FOREVER.
I received the completed brochures in the middle of March and began mailing them out in stages the following week. So far the response has not been high, but it has not been bad for a direct mail campaign. Response rates for all forms of marketing are usually low anyway, and it is still early yet. I have only mailed about 1/4 of all the brochures, and I still have four months to get the rest out, and additional letters to customers reminding them of the extra discount, and the time limit for claiming it. This way, if the response rate is really poor, or there are other indicators that leaving e-bay will not be feasible, I can always abort the decision. But, I do not think that is likely, as a lot of my customers are now repeat buyers, and even through a large number of them do not engage me, they keep coming back. Not only that, but a larger and larger number of my customers are becoming repeat buyers, as compared to before.
Toward the end of the month, I turned my attention to two other pursuits. The first was getting material organized to sell on consignment to raise cash flow for the tight months ahead. I fully expect my sales on E-bay to continue dropping over the next few months, so I need to have an alternate source of cash flow to tide us over until the B&B gets busy, which it will in the next few months. So, I began gathering together the non-Canadian material that I have on hand, that I know I will likely never get around to listing in my store, and I began to organize it for sale. I have engaged three different auctioneers to handle the material. This allows me to establish three separate cash flow streams, and it allows me to match the quality of the material to the auctioneer who will get the best results for us.
The second pursuit was to start seriously working on the website and getting it ready to go live. I already had some 7,000 listings in the inventory module from before, but now I went and imported all the listings that I had produced since the last import into the website, and began editing these listings, to get them complete, so that the website features would work properly. This turned out to be way more work than I thought. So, after a full 18 hour day of doing these edits, I finally came to the conclusion that I would need to hire some help.
This problem kept me awake for several nights as I realized that the work that needed to be done was going to take at least 6 weeks of someone's time, and that there was no way I was going to be able to afford to hire anybody local to help me. This conclusion did not sink in right away, mind you. I spent many hours looking at every government placement incentive and workforce expansion program initiative available to small businesses, and there was really nothing suitable for what I am trying to do, which is a large volume of very boring, tedious and relatively low level work done over the next few months.
So, finally, after much agonizing, I remembered the site Fiverr, where you can hire foreign based freelancers to do graphic design, programming, writing, web design and other work. Usually the rates are much more reasonable for the work involved. So, I went on there and posted a job description and had no fewer than 9 responses. I requested quotes, evaluated them and chose one of them to assist me with the website edits.
I also began sharing my blog content this month with the various stamp groups on Facebook, and have seen my blog traffic more than triple, compared to what I was getting before. Each new post that I put out there creates more awareness of my brand, and I am confident that it will eventually lead to the blog becoming a source of new customers. I have already had a few this month, and I also had my first customer engage me to provide an opinion about a stamp. It was a fellow living in the Netherlands, and he sent me a Lagos stamp, seeking my opinion on it, after reading an article in my Nigerian stamp blog.
So, I am scared to death, but at the same time I am hopeful and optimistic for the future. One of the most notable things I have experienced since starting to execute this decision is that I am more relaxed, despite the stress. The reason is that I am back in control, and I am following my own path, and not giving some faceless, unaccountable public company complete control over my future.
Onward and forward!
What I did was I went to incognito mode in Chrome and went to E-bay from there and searched for my items without logging in. While I did not see any evidence at that moment of my listings being hidden, I did notice that the appearance of my listings was different that what I was seeing when I am logged into E-bay. For one thing, when I was not logged in, I could not see my user name or feedback rating on any of my listings. It would show that I was a top rated seller, but other than that, if you were a buyer searching on E-bay, you wouldn't know one seller's listings from another until you click on it. That was a new thing that just came into effect, as I don't recall seeing it before. That might explain why a very large chunk of my E-bay sales for March came from new customers.
It was nerve wracking to see the magnitude of the slowdown. It was very noticeable, and felt almost as if the powers that be at E-bay had flipped a switch and just stopped showing my listings. Fortunately, I had enough offline sales from my established customers that we still did just over $4,500 in sales - not as good as last March, when we sold the Canada #2, but as good otherwise.
This was a remarkable month in other ways. Most importantly, it was the month when I began to execute my plan in earnest, to finally get out from under E-bay's death grip once and for all. It started with me designing and printing a brochure for all my customers, which clearly explained the benefits of shopping on my new website, as opposed to E-bay. I coupled that with a letter that I carefully crafted, which would go out to all my customers, explaining my decision to leave E-bay, and to explain the benefits of the new website. Here is a copy of it:
I realized though that as good as the brochure looked, I needed a way to gauge how many of my customers are actually going to come to my website, or at least express the intention of doing so. But how could I entice them to actually reach out and call, or send an e-mail? I thought about it long and hard, and finally it hit me: I need to offer them a real incentive. I thought about the standard 10% off your first order that a lot of places give. Then I thought, nah, this is not enough of an incentive to convince people to act - no I need something more compelling. Why not give them most of the savings that would come from not paying final value fees to E-bay? Beat E-bay at their own game. So I decided to offer any customer who registers with me before July 31, 2018, an extra 5% discount on any order they place FOREVER.
I received the completed brochures in the middle of March and began mailing them out in stages the following week. So far the response has not been high, but it has not been bad for a direct mail campaign. Response rates for all forms of marketing are usually low anyway, and it is still early yet. I have only mailed about 1/4 of all the brochures, and I still have four months to get the rest out, and additional letters to customers reminding them of the extra discount, and the time limit for claiming it. This way, if the response rate is really poor, or there are other indicators that leaving e-bay will not be feasible, I can always abort the decision. But, I do not think that is likely, as a lot of my customers are now repeat buyers, and even through a large number of them do not engage me, they keep coming back. Not only that, but a larger and larger number of my customers are becoming repeat buyers, as compared to before.
Toward the end of the month, I turned my attention to two other pursuits. The first was getting material organized to sell on consignment to raise cash flow for the tight months ahead. I fully expect my sales on E-bay to continue dropping over the next few months, so I need to have an alternate source of cash flow to tide us over until the B&B gets busy, which it will in the next few months. So, I began gathering together the non-Canadian material that I have on hand, that I know I will likely never get around to listing in my store, and I began to organize it for sale. I have engaged three different auctioneers to handle the material. This allows me to establish three separate cash flow streams, and it allows me to match the quality of the material to the auctioneer who will get the best results for us.
The second pursuit was to start seriously working on the website and getting it ready to go live. I already had some 7,000 listings in the inventory module from before, but now I went and imported all the listings that I had produced since the last import into the website, and began editing these listings, to get them complete, so that the website features would work properly. This turned out to be way more work than I thought. So, after a full 18 hour day of doing these edits, I finally came to the conclusion that I would need to hire some help.
This problem kept me awake for several nights as I realized that the work that needed to be done was going to take at least 6 weeks of someone's time, and that there was no way I was going to be able to afford to hire anybody local to help me. This conclusion did not sink in right away, mind you. I spent many hours looking at every government placement incentive and workforce expansion program initiative available to small businesses, and there was really nothing suitable for what I am trying to do, which is a large volume of very boring, tedious and relatively low level work done over the next few months.
So, finally, after much agonizing, I remembered the site Fiverr, where you can hire foreign based freelancers to do graphic design, programming, writing, web design and other work. Usually the rates are much more reasonable for the work involved. So, I went on there and posted a job description and had no fewer than 9 responses. I requested quotes, evaluated them and chose one of them to assist me with the website edits.
I also began sharing my blog content this month with the various stamp groups on Facebook, and have seen my blog traffic more than triple, compared to what I was getting before. Each new post that I put out there creates more awareness of my brand, and I am confident that it will eventually lead to the blog becoming a source of new customers. I have already had a few this month, and I also had my first customer engage me to provide an opinion about a stamp. It was a fellow living in the Netherlands, and he sent me a Lagos stamp, seeking my opinion on it, after reading an article in my Nigerian stamp blog.
So, I am scared to death, but at the same time I am hopeful and optimistic for the future. One of the most notable things I have experienced since starting to execute this decision is that I am more relaxed, despite the stress. The reason is that I am back in control, and I am following my own path, and not giving some faceless, unaccountable public company complete control over my future.
Onward and forward!
