Once you decide you need a system to keep you and your selling organized it isn't hard to find systems to buy. Ebay has several to choose from and there are many other vendors, all of whom claim their system is exactly what you need. This creates several problems.
Cost. All these systems come at a price. Most are based on a monthly subscription model. You decide how many auctions you might have active at one time and pick a subscription plan that meets your needs.
Choice. It is not easy, especially when you are first starting out, to know which features of the selling systems you will actually need. They all include the basics, but how they work and, more importantly, how they work for you is much harder to determine. In fact, I believe the only way to know for sure is to actually try to use them. Keep in mind that once you sign up for a subscription service you have esentially jumped onto a treadmill. The meter keeps running even if you don't do anything.
Learning Curve. All the commercial sales systems showcase their features in comparison to the systems from other vendors. All claim they are easy to use. That is not really true. The reality is that selling on Ebay is not simple! As they have "matured" the rules and requirements have gotten more and more detailed. A selling system may make it "easy" to get a couple items listed, but if you expect to sell a lot of items, over a period of time there is no way to avoid learning a lot of details. Take advantage of vendors free trial periods to test their systems. It will be time well spent.
A Good Fit. Features by themselves don't make a system that will work for you. People have different learning styles and background knowledge. Commecial software is written by people with different learning styles too. It isn't talked about much, but the programmers understanding of how things work incluences the way the systems they build operate. It is very likely that two systems with apparently identical features will have a completely different look and feel. You have to spend time, sometimes a lot of time, to find these things. You have to do it yourself. Reading reviews written by others doesn't help because their learning style is probably not the same as yours.
Build your own selling system. We have tried several of the commercial systems and have always found them difficult to learn, needlessly complex, and expensive. Having been in and around the programming business since 1975 we recognize the methodologies used to build them. New is not always better, but the fact is many of the free tools available today are more intuitive and powerful than the old system designs. We have come to believe we can build a powerful Selling Stuff System™ from a variety of free and public domain sources. We will be developing that system as we sell our own stuff.
{ 0 comments… add one now }