Having a retail space gives you immediate credibility with buyers, but it adds a tremendous amount of expense and personal commitment of time and energy to run one successfully. You need to have a real knack for working with people to go face-to-face like this. Online, it’s different. You HAVE no face, not really, just faceBOOK and a seller’s homepage, which is a sea of anonymity in a seemingly transparent envelope.
When you log onto eBay as a seller, it’s a different experience entirely than the one you had as an end-user buyer. As a buyer, you needed to know nothing — you had to depend on the seller to know what they had and what it’s worth, and mostly that was dead wrong, if you go back and look at it closely.
A buyer just looks for what they want and depends on the seller to know where to find it and how to present it for sale, how to pack and ship, and at the same time, depends on the SITE’s reality and level of credibility, which it lends to the seller.
Most eBay sellers are amateur one-hit wonders, with some crap from the attic, garage or grampa’s cabin, and they have no real clue what it is they happen to have in their hands, or even the smallest clue to find out what it’s worth, but the pro sellers do know these factoids and they also calculate the shipping costs plus acquisition costs and hidden costs of sales and taxes and much, much more, just because they are pros.
When you first join the ranks of the pro seller on eBay, it’s not the same as being on other selling sites. There is a qualitative and quantitative differential between eBay and the few surviving alternatives to eBay, all of which don’t come even close to eBay’s performance as a selling site.
Sure, a lot of the selling sites show interesting stuff for sale, but the key point about any selling site is — are there more sellers than buyers? If so, you’re selling on the wrong site.
The secret of making a bright and powerful Beacon Effect across the face of the globe is the TEAM working on the worldwide INTERNET to place listings with magical WORDS, magical SOUNDS and magical IMAGES that can profoundly affect the outcome of the planet’s recovery to health and well-being and the calming of humanity into a non-warring species, the first requirement of Federation admission.
A planet not in peace is not welcome in any Federation, Galactic or otherwise, and part of your job is to bring peace and harmony to this planet now, while there’s still time to act.
A TEAM of people working actively on eBay is the real secret to powerful success in this endeavor to widen the “Beacon Effect” on Planet Earth through eBay Marketing and Sales, and the strengthening of the Beacon Effect by gathering and communicating about these efforts, helping others to work and understand.
The most important part of selling on eBay is that the selling is not important, just the listing action. Submitting the listing successfully is the only action that needs to happen there to make the magic work.
Magical symbology abounds in the listings, along with words, phrases and sounds that create the effect, compounded by your own SuperBeacon, Matrix and Ammies on-site with you at your listing location. This magic cannot be turned off by absence of sales. Money has no effect on the outcome.
Even if nobody comes to see your listing, and nobody ever buys anything from your eBay listings, they cost you nothing if you do them right, and they work magically even without visitors or sales.
On the other hand, it’s pretty certain that, if you list enough things, you will make a sale or two, so be prepared for success as readily as failure.
There are a lot of nice ways to sell items online, and in those cases, you won’t have to brace yourself before you call to try to settle some mistake or misunderstanding or to get help with a problem with your store.
It is true that eBay is nasty, nasty, nasty — oh, not personally nasty, but in a stonewalling and indifferent sort of “corporate” way, they are unnecessarily mean to their sellers and smirkingly, almost obscenely, nice to their buyer population, by which I mean, “the customer is always right” becomes the LAW on eBay, whether you personally subscribe to the classic merchant’s doctrine that the customer is always right.
Myself, I disbelieve that bullshit entirely. It was invented by obsequious toadies licking the boots of their clients.
The fact is that the customer is mostly wrong, because they typically don’t want to be bothered finding out, so they pay a merchant to know and find out and charge them accordingly.
You will have to deal with the fact that you CAN’T be right as a seller and that you will have to choke back any complaint because not only can you not reach the right people to tell them what creeps they are, but they have so much business that they can afford to ignore you and the horse you rode in on. Right there is a Work Effort that you will find hard to beat and hard to handle.
Speaking from long personal experience, the customer is almost always wrong, and I don’t mind telling him or her so face-to-face, because I’m not in it for the money. If they walk away because I told them the truth, that’s not my problem, because I have no interest in the money, just the game.
In order to be a good seller anywhere in any venue and in any marketplace, you have to start out by not playing the game for the money. If you play for the cash, you’ll never amount to anything in The Work, and that’s a fact.
Okay, so how do you tune yourself out of the money game? No problem, just imagine all your money being buried with your body when it’s dead and you’ve moved on. Obtain a pencil-signed art print of “Me & My Money” from the original pastel. It’s sometimes available on eBay at $112.50 if I remember rightly.
So, looking at that pile of gold in front of the casket, what does any ordinary human world achievement or accumulation of wealth mean now?
I sure hope you can get there, because not caring about the money is the most critical and fundamental part of playing the merchant game really right, with Right Action in the Buddhist sense of the phrase.
Keep in mind that the first hurdle in the game is to actually register on eBay as a seller, because if you don’t play the game you can’t get hurt, but you also can’t possibly win.
Most folks really don’t get that concept. If you don’t play, you guarantee that you lose. Not playing the game for fear of losing makes losing the only possible final outcome, see???
I do know how hard it is to just get started, just get the first listing up. I have experience at this for many years, yet it took me days to get acquainted with the system as it is now, and you will just have to learn patience — that is, if you take up the challenge at all.
If you’re like most folks, you’ll entertain the thought for a moment or two, then shrug it off as not important, not related to you, having nothing whatever to do with personal evolution or any of your personal and life goals.
That would be very wrong. If you don’t understand the magical action, that’s okay, understanding might someday come, but don’t use ignorance and fear of making an effort stand in the way of your progress.
If you don’t know how to make the first move, contact Yanesh. That IS the first move, because you need instruction and help on how to organize your efforts and from whence you get your stuff for sales, along with how to operate the software machinery of eBay.
I will NOT organize a team. That’s entirely up to the community leadership, which is you.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby