We have a lot (thousands) of items to sell. Many of them are low value things; to valuable to throw away, but not worth spending a lot of time on. If we develop an efficient selling system we make it profitable to sell more of these items because we reduce the time spent selling to the absolute minimum.
Efficiency is also important because we don't want to spend eighteen hours per day, seven day per week selling our stuff. The idea is to clear out the house, make some money, and spend the money doing things we enjoy.
Selling an item on Ebay produces an absolute mountain of email. For each item sold there can easily be seven to ten emails generated. I have noticed that as Ebay has made the feedback scores absolutely critical sellers are using more and more emails in an effort to have erfect communication with buyers. It is really easy to miss something or mix one sale with another. Since the seller feedback scores are so important we want a system in place that prevents mistakes which would lower them.
As buyers we have had two or three times where a seller sent us the wrong stuff. We do not want to ever be in that situation ourselves. If you haven't tried Ebay sales before it sounds easy to keep track of who bought what. In reality, once you have more than a couple of auctions active, it is surprisingly easy to make a mistake. We want to have a system in place that precents mistakes.
We want to keep track of what we have accomplished. We need a system that records what we sold, how we sold it, sales prices, net profit, etc. We think it should be possible to have a system in place which more or less automatically stores sales information for analysis.
A few years ago the book "The E-Myth" was quite popular. The authors mantra was "Work on the business while you are working in the business." He believes you should be writing procedures for everything you are doing to make the business work so you can eventually turn most of it over to people who don't need to understand much of anything to get the job done. Standard procedures are how you get this done.
We don't anticipate hiring employees, but do want systems in place to protect the business from ourselves. Everyone gets tired, rushed, sick, or distracted occasionally. We want systems in place to make sure we can't make mistakes when that happens.
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