Stock up with a wide variety of items to meet the needs of a broad audience.  Doing your research and learning what items sell well for you should be key items to keep in stock.  If you are passionate about an item that does well on eBay, than that’s an added bonus.  I choose a variety of new and used Boutique clothing items, and mix in toys around the holiday season.  That’s what works for me.  A BIG thing to keep in mind is stock ALL seasons ALL the time.  There are different countries in opposite seasons making potetial sales endless.

BUT, be mindful of getting stuck in your comfort zone.  Try new things and expand slowly building your customer base to a wide range of repeat buyers.  Selling clothing, for example, limits you to one target market.  It may require reaching out to a larger source of suppliers found at World Wide Brands.  Find items that compliment what you already sell. Make it more of a ‘one stop shop’ feeling to the buyer.  If you sell children’s clothing – compliment it with maternity clothing, and/or baby bedding.

Happy Selling! 

My #1 recommendation for choosing the right web host: Ask an expert.

And I don’t just mean any “expert.” Your friend’s brother who sells stuff on Ebay is not going to be the kind of web hosting expert that you need. Here are some qualifications for your expert:

• Needs to be a techie with experience in hosting websites like to yours. In other words, if your aunt sells a couple of hair ribbons in her Etsy shop, she’s not going to be able to help you sell $80,000 in products from your website each month without crashing the server. Ideally, your expert will have experience working with sites the same size (traffic, bandwidth, etc) as yours larger.
• Needs to have worked with more than one web host. I know, it’s tempting to go to that colleague who has a complementary, or even competitive site, and go with the host they are using. But if they’ve only used one host, and only hosted one site, they could be experiencing issues they don’t realize they have, like rude staff, or unusually long wait times for issues.
• Needs to understand the issues that can arise from bad hosting. If you end up with a bad host, you could find yourself without any customer service, customer support people who are rude, at best, and more downtime than uptime. (Downtime is where your site cannot be accessed from the Internet.) You could end up with a really slow website and no resolution from the company.
• Must understand your site’s unique needs. Do you need to host a podcast each week, with audio files that people will download and listen to frequently? Do you need a robust ecommerce solution that will put a lot of strain on a server? Make sure your expert understands these issues when recommending a web host.

When I talk to small business owners about their websites, I make sure I find out about their unique needs, how their website is performing now and what their goals are for the future. I then evaluate their website in terms of whether or not I feel that my team can provide the website hosting that they need. If not, I recommend that they go somewhere else.

Most often though, we can handle what the business owner needs, since we offer shared hosting accounts, VPS  and dedicated servers. Our support staff is friendly and knowledgeable, and we’re willing to go the extra mile to make sure you get what you need. We also offer at least two different options — we teach you how to do the task for free, or we offer to do the task for you for a reasonable rate.

If you have any questions about hosting your website, contact me today about your web hosting needs.

Making changes mid-way can be expensive, or just downright impossible. So it’s very important to make the right decision upfront.

One of the main things I do when I talk to a potential client is figure out what they need in a shopping cart and which of the carts we work with will benefit the client the most. I know not all of you are ready to take the step to ask for a business consultation, so I’d like to put together a few reviews and a comparision chart for you.

And if you’re an experienced online seller already, I’d love to include your opinions. What are your favorite carts? What features do you like the most? What do you displike most about your cart?

One of the Sparkplugging interns and I are in the process interviewing people who are familiar with the under-the-hood portions of the carts and we’re putting together the chart as well. We’d love to have your input to add to the mix.

Please reply to this post, letting us know what you think. Your advice may save another small business owner from making the wrong decision. Thank you!

Having a store will save you time and money. Currently, store listing fees are only .03-.05 cents per listing, depending on your asking price. If you elect to use the GTC (Good ‘Til Canceled) option, this will enable your items to automatically re-list at the end of 30 days, giving you more time to concentrate on making sales. You can list hundreds of items to your store inventory for practically nothing, as opposed to maintaining auctions all of the time. With store items, fees will still apply when your item sells, but the over-head for stocking your store is a lot less than constantly running and re-listing auctions each week. An added advantage is that you will be saving time by stocking your store rather than bothering with listing auctions. By listing all types of items throughout all seasons, you are opening yourself up to a wide variety of buyers. Shipping worldwide will also allow unlimited potential for buyers in other parts of the world who are in opposite seasons and in need of items that may be difficult for them to find at the time, but readily available for you to sell in your shop.

A major key to having a successful store is to continually keep it stocked. This lets you build your inventory to include hundreds of items. The more you list, the more you sell – it’s been proven time and time again. Why? eBay is a wonderful generator of automatic traffic, built in for you to harness without the needed technical experience of running an actual separate online store.

Having an eBay store is your own slice of the Internet. Buyers will check out your store, and by cross-selling other items within each item description, you will be able to recommend items in your store that may interest them. If you offer combined or discounted shipping for multiple
items purchased, customers will be compelled to buy more from you at one time. A store also allows sellers to use features like the Markdown Manager which is not available to non-store owners.

eBay offers tons of additional features at no additional cost. These added features will help you build up clientele for email marketing and more. This will allow you to keep in touch and let your personal email list know of special discounts available to them first before it’s open to the public.

Your store gives you your own unique style. Having a personal, unique design allows you to build your brand and specialize, which encourages repeat buyers. Once you master the features of your eBay store, then it’s time to break out and take advantage of outside opportunities to attract more buyers to your product.

The last thing you need as a new business owner is your own horror story. Those bad experiences cost time and money. And sometimes at least a small bit of your sanity.

So how can you avoid the whole mess in the first place?

Before I share that tidbit of information with you, let me tell you a little bit about myself and my web hosting experiences. While many people have worked with multiple web hosting companies over the years, I’ve actually run my own hosting company. I know the inside story on what web hosting clients want, based on what my own clients have told me. And I know the inside story on what it takes to run a web hosting business, because I’ve been in the trenches, so to speak, for more than 7 years.

I’ve helped clients leave other hosting companies and cleaned up their messes. I’ve had a few clients leave my company for other hosts, for various reasons. And I have a lot of happy clients, including those who have been with my company since the beginning.

I have a unique view from both sides of the fence, and I’d like to share what I know to help you make better decisions, whether that means you choose my web hosting company, or someone else’s.

The #1 most important thing I recommend you do is ask your colleagues or a trusted web designer with sites a little bit bigger in size and traffic to yours to recommend the host. A personal referral from someone who runs or builds similar websites will go a long way in protecting you from ending up with a lemon.

Now, there is a caveat to go along with this. Asking one friend for a referral is not the only step you need to take. Don’t take the recommendation and buy a hosting account in the very next step. You still need to do your homework.

1. Get four or five recommendations from different colleagues or your web designer.
2. Do a search on Google for reviews of the company.
3. Check out the company’s testimonials and contact some of those clients to see how happy they are with their hosting.
4. Contact the company itself to ask about their usage policies, their server specs, how they manage bandwidth overages, billing and client communication. Make sure their servers can handle the software you plan to use for your site.
5. Read the company’s terms of service, acceptable use policies and any other legalese they have. If they don’t publish that information on the web where you can find it easily, find another company. Make sure you understand what you’re reading. If you don’t, find someone who does.

If you’ve followed these instructions and still aren’t sure, tune in next week for the next installment of this series: What do web hosting companies and cheese have in common?

And if you don’t want to wait that long, contact me for a 1-hour web hosting consultation and I can help you figure out to get the services you need and the quality you expect at the price you can afford.

I’ve worked with a few hosting companies — and currently run my own — so I’ve experienced a few of the horror stories and fixed a few messes. And I can tell you right now that choosing the right hosting company from the beginning will save you a lot of headaches.

This post is the first in a series on this topic, since bit-sized chunks of information tend to be a bit easier to digest.

For starters, here are the top three web hosting mistakes new business owners make.

1. Choosing the least expensive host with unlimited this and insanely cheap that. Signing up for that hosting account is kind of like buying a used car. You get sucked in by all the bells and whistles — the unlimited bandwidth and brand new engine.What they don’t tell you is that hiding behind the “unlimited” bandwidth is an acceptable use policy that limits your resource usage — a statistic that most companies don’t allow you to see, let alone monitor yourself.Oh, and that used car with the new engine? Hiding behind that shiny engine is a transmission with 200,000 miles and three months of life.
2. Signing up for a year of hosting — and then finding the perfect shopping cart that won’t run on your new host’s servers. In other words, before you sign any contracts or make any commitments, you need to make sure all the pieces to your online business fit together.For example, I had a client come to me for a website design. She had picked out a cart and wanted me to create the design for her. We realized too late that the hosting company’s servers ran Windows — and the cart she wanted to use would only run on a Linux machine. In other words, the two wouldn’t work together.
3. Hosting your site with your kid’s friend’s brother who lives down the street and has a server in his parent’s basement. Or choosing a very young company, or one that doesn’t have a very good track record.One of my design clients purchased a cheap hosting account several years ago. The client ran a busy parenting message board with dozens of people surfing daily. Everything was fine for a couple of months — and then the client started getting database errors and the site would run very, very slowly during certain times of the day. We contacted the host, who rebooted the server or MySQL a few times.And then one day, the site disappeared.

   The only thing left was a database error message in everyone’s browsers. Oh, and I had an inbox filling up with database errors — one for each time someone tried to access the site or hit the refresh key. So I contacted the host via email (their preferred contact method) to find out what had happened.

   I never heard back from the host. Trust me, if you’re running a busy ecommerce site and your mortgage depends on your sales, you don’t want this to happen!

If you are depending on your site to say online at least 99 percent of the time, choose the company with the best customer service and equipment, not the best price.

Next in our series: My #1 tip for choosing the right hosting company for your business.

Sparkplugging is starting a new tradition called “Spark an idea Thursday.” As part of this tradition, I’ll be sharing with you my experiences and interpretations for each week’s topic for those of you who sell products or services online.

I invite you to grab our image over there to the right and carry the tradition through to your own blog. If you do, please link back to this post so we know where you were inspired!

The theme of this week’s Spark an Idea Thursday is: Spark an Idea about Goal Setting.

My husband and I do this at least once a month: We decide that neither of us wants to cook. And we don’t want sandwiches. And yesterday was payday, so, “Hey! Let’s just go get something to eat.”

So we hop in the car and head to town. About halfway down the road, Steve asks me where I want to go to eat. I respond that I’m hungry, but not for anything in particular.

Steve tells me that he isn’t either, but he needs to know where we’re going so that he knows which way to turn — north or south.

You see where this is going.

We have no specific goal — just that we want food, and we don’t want to make it — so at some point in the trip, we end up sitting at an intersection and hoping no one pulls up behind us before we decide what we want to eat.

The point? The business owner who starts out without a goal is going to end up sitting at that intersection…

This business owner knows she wants a successful business, but really has no roadmap for success. And she can’t plan her trip because she has no idea where she is going.

The results:

• One client came to me with more than a dozen blogs setup at Blogger, each on a separate topic. Each blog had one or two posts written more than a year ago.
• Another client had me design a site. She sent me most of the information I needed to create her site. I did as much of the work as I could and sent an email requesting more information. She sent it — a year later. Her lack of a solid goal, and her fear of success, lead her to put off the website project.
• A colleague spent thousands of dollars on seminars, information products and other learning resources — but never setup a website, never put a plan into action.

In spite of my lack of fast food goalsetting, I’ve realized how important it is so set goals for your business. If you’re a bit scared of setting goals, or aren’t sure where to start, try these tips:

1. Determine where it is you want to end up. Do you want to sell 1 million widgets? Do you want to earn a living as an image consultant? Are you wanting to take the baby sling market by storm with your innovative design? Write this goal down.
2. Now it’s time to be realistic. What steps do you need to take to make this happen? Do you need to build a website? Do you need to take classes, or educate yourself through research? Do you need to create a product?
3. Talk to people who have done what you are doing, or done things similar to what you are doing — the experts. Find out what kind of timeline you’re looking at. Is it going to take five or ten years to sell 1 million widgets? Is it going to take 2 years of school and 5 years of on-the-job experience to become an image consultant? Is it going to take a year of trial and error and testing to come up with the perfect baby sling pattern that can be reproduced enmasse and in different sizes?
4. Write down each step you need to take and how long you estimate it will take. Pin this up on your wall and mark off each step as you complete it.
5. And finally, the most important step: TAKE Action!

Don’t forget: If you’d like to speak with someone who can help you with your action plan, who is not afraid to take action, contact me for a free 30-minute consultation.

Be consistent! 

I had a great chat last night on the 2009 Hot Seminar Series hosted by Kelly McCausey.  One of the obsticals that we discussed about eBay selling was consistancy. Work at a pace you are comfortable with. Your business is not going to grow overnight. Burning the midnight oil is only going to make you overwhelmed and want to give up. You can’t expect yourself to list hundreds of items to your eBay store in one day.  BUT, if you’re consistent at listing a few things each night (or whatever you’re comfortable with) – you’re goal of filling your eBay store will be accomplished before you know it!  Also, constantly listing will keep the Search Engine traffic coming.  If you don’t keep listing – the traffic will decrease – ultimately so will your sales.

Stay Focused

I’m a very schedule oriented person.  If something is minute later than scheduled – it just throws me into a tizzy!  I’ve been getting better at not letting some things bother me – but when it comes to being focused on my business, there must be a strict schedule so I can stay focused and accomplish what needs to be done in a reasonable amount of time.  Focusing on one thing at a time will ensure that you’re putting 100% into what needs to be done.  This will make sure it’s done right the first time – and that feels good!

Today, you can search Google for “baby slings” and come up with almost 400,000 websites. Practically every popular parenting website already has baby sling and cloth diaper retailers advertising their wares.  How can you possibly compete with that?

Here are a couple of ideas that have proven profitable for other small businesses:

1. Promote locally. Check out your local area for competition and for customers. Perhaps your city, if it’s large enough, your county, or even your state may be able to support your business during the startup phase. Research the area to find out how much interest there is in your product, whether it’s baby related, jewelry, or something else.

Even though there are tons of other sellers on the Internet, you can become the local expert, the hometown face that everyone associates with your product. Just remember, do your research and be prepared to get out of the house and meet people, at local events, at trade shows, at festivals and networking groups.

2. Do something different. One of my clients started selling pregnancy tests online. You’re thinking, seriously? Who would buy pregnancy tests online when you can get them down at the local pharmacy? Well, that’s the thing. Many people would prefer not to leave the comfort of their homes to buy the product. Not to mention, my client offered exceptional customer support with the product, She’d answer your questions via phone or email, any time. Much better than asking the pharmacy guy questions about peeing on a stick, right?

3. Partner with others. If you’re starting a bath and body store, partner up with the already established candle shop to promote each others products. Go to your local boutiques that cater to your target market and see if they will add your products to their shops.  Not only will you benefit from their traffic and existing relationships, but their benefit from the extra sales.

The caveat to these three ideas? Do your research. Find out if your local market will support your business. Find out what your potential competitors do, so that you can stand out. And then find those partners who are willing and capable of working with you.

She’s got some awesome information on shopping carts . . .

Moms who stay at home are the biggest group of people who try to earn a living by working at home. They don’t have to worry about daycare costs and they can volunteer at school or easily care for a sick child because they have a flexible schedule.

Do a simple Google search for the term “work at home moms” and you’ll discover over 5,640,000 websites dedicated to this target market. There’s no doubt that this trend is growing!

But this work at home mom (or WAHM) market is also the one that gets hit with the most scams. Unscrupulous people prey on the moms who are starting out, who so desperately want to sell their own products that they will invest in a fraudulent program or who will be convinced they need to spend hundreds of dollars each month on a shopping cart with lots of bells and whistles.

Moms and small business owners also start their businesses on modest budgets and are generally very careful not to spend money they don’t have yet. They are the ones who rely on the free shopping carts and free autoresponder services which are very limiting because they’re not as secure and upgrading to the better paid services in the future can often be difficult when trying to export your current contacts from the free version.

Small businesses everywhere need to be smart with their money but also know when to invest in a program that can grow with their business. Even if you have just one product to sell, invest in a shopping cart that offers:

• Secure ordering – as mentioned earlier, customers will feel more at ease buying from a secure site, knowing their credit card information is encrypted and safe.
• Multiple payment options – don’t let your customer leave without purchasing just because you don’t accept the one credit card they carry. People who dislike credit cards might opt for PayPal so offering multiple options will increase your chances of making a sale.
• Multiple product and pricing options – don’t let the shopping cart manufacturer tell you how many products you can offer! Choose a cart that allows you to add as many of your products as you like and offer different pricing options, such as a flat fee, subscription, or installments.
• Autoresponder – how will you reconnect with your current customers in another 6 months? An autoresponder feature will automatically record your customers’ email addresses so you can keep them informed of new products or sales, which might make them a repeat customer.
• Excellent customer service – even if you know your way around the computer pretty well, inevitably you’ll have a question or experience some sort of problem. Rather than wondering if your support ticket is floating around in cyberworld, knowing your support team will help you quickly is comforting.

If you’re going to dream about working from home, you might as well dream big! Finding a shopping cart that offers features you can use in the near future is a smart move.

If you’re uncertain about which shopping cart to use or what features you want for your business, that’s alright, too. You can find more answers about shopping carts and ecommerce technology at http://ShoppingCartFaqNews.com and download our free report: “Why You Need a Shopping Cart”.

Regina has been an online and offline entrepreneur and internet marketer for over ten years. She is a Certified Business Coach at ReginaBaker.com. As Co-Founder of Wahmcart.com a web based ecommerce solution (secure shopping cart, affiliate software, tracking and the follow-up management system) for small businesses, Regina is also a Ecommerce Resident Expert and Founder of ShoppingCartFaq.com, a frequently asked questions website concerning shopping carts, autoresponders, tracking and affiliate management systems.

It’s time to start building.

Here are some considerations in organizing your store.

Categorizing
First, you need to think about how to categorize your products. Think about User Experience first and SEO second. From a usability perspective, you want your users to navigate your site freely and easily. When they are looking for something specific, there is nothing worse than making them think too hard – you will lose them for sure.

When you are designing your categories, don’t be afraid to include a product in multiple categories. You can group products by function, style and manufacturer. Maybe by price too. Whatever you think will benefit your customers and get them to what they want . . . quickly.

Pictures
Make great use of pictures in your store. While the spiders like to see text on your page, humans love pictures and pictures sell!! I like to put pictures towards the top and then put text towards the bottom. If the user wants to scroll down and read what you hvae to say – great. Otherwise, they will start clicking away on the pictures.

On your product pages, have several pictures. Remember that the user is trying to “experience” your product online. Anything you can do to make them feel they are seeing the product at all angles will help. Video is a big plus too.

Descriptions
Avoid using your manufacturer’s descriptions. We are all guilty of taking the easy way out sometimes, but when you use your manufacturer descriptions, not only will you put your customers to sleep – you also may be penalized by Google for duplicate content. They have filters looking at these things and the last thing you want is to have your page left out of the index because it is considered a duplicate.

If you are serious about getting your online business off the ground, you have to attend this new exciting event – The System Beginner Bootcamp - in Chicago on November 8th & 9th. There are two full days of information about getting started online.

I am presenting with Howie Jacobson, James Martell and Cindy Kappler – and of Course, Ken McCarthy. I will be teaching how to start your eCommerce business.