Recession – A Double Edged Sword for Online Sellers!

Recession has hit the World Economy severely. Corporate biggies are crumbling down like a card house; employees are pink slipped; bail outs are declared and every day SENSEX is deepening down by some numbers. Reuters has reported that in “the U.S. recession will probably be the longest since World War Two and could worsen without heavy government spending, according to a closely-watched survey of economists…” Amidst such gloomy global economic scenario, there is still a light of hope is lit up for online sellers. Let’s discover some of such facts that have really inspired more people to join the online selling sector. Before this, a small explanation of Recession would be more helpful for readers in realising SUCCESSES as an online seller.

Wikipedia defines Recession as “In economics, a recession is a general slowdown in economic activity in a country over a sustained period of time, or a business cycle contraction. During recessions, many macroeconomic indicators vary in a similar way. Production as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employment, investment spending, capacity utilization, household incomes and business profits all fall during recessions. Governments usually respond to recessions by adopting expansionary macroeconomic policies, such as increasing money supply, increasing government spending and decreasing taxation.”

It is obvious that during recession both the Production and Consumption of Products (i.e. including Goods and Services) goes down substantially. So as a seller, it is really hard to push products through possible buyers. That’s why companies and business organisations start giving discounts coupons, free trials, extended warranties to motivate buyers. Here online sellers can see their opportunities to make a good business despite recession. Another source of opportunity is electronic and digital sector, where buyers always look for second had, refurbished and ex demo products. So Product Promotion is one of the major challenges during recession. Just handing over discount coupons won’t help your business glitter; you need a constant effort to take more cost-cutting measures and at the same time make your buyers feel that it is worthy enough to make purchases with you. Here follows some valuable tips that may help your business make the best out of recession:

• Give your business a hi-tech shape and invest in skilled people. Technology may be expensive, but it helps you saving more in the long run which would have paid in salary to unskilled employees. A technological alternative of your business is surely a cost-cutting measure. Give it a serious thought, understand your business requirements and look for a company that deals with similar solutions.

• Put Sales on Top Priority List. Arrange one hour everyday to train your sales staff on marketing. Analyse daily sales and let them identify the positives, negatives and solutions to boost your sales. Acknowledge, Complement and Award who performs the best in the team.

• Introduce the online version of your business. Maximise the number of channels, where you can share your product inventory. Join Affiliate Portals, where you can find experienced people who can sales your products to potential buyers on commission basis.

So why shading tears on recession! Now you can battle out Recession taking advantage of its double-edged sword.

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Web 2.0 – What Why and How Explained!

Web 2.0 is a technological realization of World Wide Web. It describes the evolving trends in the adaptation of World Wide Web Technology (including web development, web design and information management). Some of the best outcomes of Web 2.0 are Social-Networking Sites, Video Sharing Sites, Wikis, Blogs, and Folksonomies. It would be misleading to comprehend Web 2.0 as a Specific Technological Update; but rather a Revolutionary and Evolutionary change in the way we Use and Utilize the Web. Tim O’Reilly defines the Web 2.0 as, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

Let’s make a One-to-One Markup between Web 1.0 (dot-Com) and Web 2.0 through some concrete examples:

Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0: DoubleClick --> Google AdSense; Ofoto --> Flickr; Akamai --> BitTorrent; mp3.com --> Napster; Britannica Online --> Wikipedia; personal websites --> blogging; evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB; domain name speculation --> search engine optimization; page views --> cost per click; screen scraping --> web services; publishing --> participation; content management systems --> wikis; directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy"); and stickiness --> syndication. This list can further be expanded and one can easily draw a comparison between these previous web application combinations. Despite such a wide level of Web 2.0 adaptation, most have missed out the opportunity to understand and implement the Web 2.0 standard. Let’s chalk out the base principles behind Web 2.0:

Strategic Positioning:

• The WEB as Platform

User Positioning:

• You Control Your Own Data

Core Competencies:

• Services, Not Packaged Software;


• Architecture of Participation;


• Cost-Effective Scalability;


• Remixable Data Source and Data Transformations;


• Software Above the Level of a Single Device; and


• Harnessing Collective Intelligence.

Web 2.0 appears to be Imperative, but how does imperative buy Fortune for you? Let’s precisely make out what's basic distinction about Web 2.0 and how these distinctions can harness your organization’s bottom line. Web 2.0 is an APPROACH that attempts to improve how businesses, customers, and partners interaction runs. it opens up a variety of new business models. Web 2.0 is a kind of business revolution in the IT industry caused by the move to the World Wide Web as a basic platform, and an attempt to comprehend the rules for success on that newly created platform. Significant among those rules is this: Develop applications that strengthen network effects to get better the more users use them. Here follows some basic principles that may help you remodeling and developing your existing business model to Web 2.0 standard:

• Don’t consider software as an object, but as a process of engaging users. This can be termed as The Perpetual Beta.


• Your data and services should have re-usability. This principle can be defined as Small Pieces Loosely Joined.


• Don’t think of applications that reside on either client or server, but build applications that reside in the space between devices.


• Remember that in a network environment, open APIs and standard protocols win, but this doesn’t mean that the idea of competitive advantage goes away.


• Chief among the future sources of lock in and competitive advantage will be data, whether through increasing returns from user-generated data.

(Courtesy: EDU.ru)

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Make Your Business Count This Year!

After Year-End Sales closing, the first three months are usually the best time for online merchants to conduct and implement all kinds of Researches, Renovations and Resolutions. After Holiday Sales Bonanza is over, it's the right time to reassess your business.

2009 has brought a lot of changes to eBay's base platform and the growing determination of many online sellers to go Multi-Channel are two major factors in recent times. These two factors have really inspired sellers to work out such experiments with their businesses and these three months are the right time to do so.

I personally have spoken to several of my seller friends (most of them are from eBay background) to find out what exactly they were planning to work out during these three months and to my surprise most of them have complied with me that they wanted to go global with apt technological support for their growing business. Though Recession towards the end of the previous year has marred a lot of such planning, yet sellers have not stopped becoming bold so far as implementing innovative stuffs. After assessing all replies, I discovered Four Decisions that sellers are keen to concentrate during these three months.

Look into the Barrel Down

A proper analysis of the things that worked and did not work for your business over the previous year is one of the best ways to assess your business. EBay is such a platform where you can sell anything to anybody. Some eBay Sellers said they plan to get rid of slow-moving or non-performing inventory to better help them assess and restructure their business.

One of among my eBay seller friends, Tina explained me, "I could see that my performance on eBay was improving, but the major problem is with tax as I feel that my profits were going straight to the Internal Revenue Service."

Mr. Bennet, another eBay seller has decided to liquidate his baby wear inventory as he is finding his electronic shop has performing pretty well. He would put his baby wear products on auction style to finish up the inventory. This will facilitate him analyzing his inventory. "I’ve already decided to make the storage space more organised, and to examine and explore where I can generate maximum profit."

Diversify

Buyers are always active and browsing pages for shopping every moment, and you need to be ready to meet their demand, too. Enlisting your products on multiple channels (i.e. marketplaces), as well as setting up a Web Store is an added advantage for your business. You can get your potential buyers gather through various popular social networking sites. Further these social communities can be utilized for promoting upcoming products and brand awareness. Some of such popular social networking sites are Facebook, My Space, Twitter, Orkut and Hi5.

Professional and Personalised Customer Service

Customers are normal human beings and mostly driven by emotions. Though emotions and feelings do not run a business, yet it can help your business growing immensely. Prepare a list of previous customers as well as their emails and keep in touch with them in regular interval with personalized messages. As an online seller, you should have a system for regular communication with previous customers. The advantage of such a system improves your Customer Retention Average and as per experts Customer Retention costs lesser in comparison to New Customer Acquisition.

Give Coupons

Coupon sites are one of the best ways to promote your inventory. Such coupon sites have really been popular among buyers during past few years. These types of sites have become very popular over the past couple of years, and going to get more popular in such a gloomy global economy scenario. More and more buyers are ensuring for any such discount coupons before checking out on any store. So why not using such coupon sites to give some added exposure for your products!

I hope these valuable tips surely help you and your business grow substantially this year and make 2009, a successful business year for you.

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Amazon – A Mystery for Sellers and Buyers!

Amazon has always a mystery for people who wish to make some extra money selling things online. It’s not the Amazon that only provides the opportunity to sell things to potential buyers, there are other popular marketplaces like eBay are too well-known. We can simply draw a comparison line between Amazon and eBay that they are into the same sector where buyers and seller explore each other for possible transactions. But both are completely different from each other so far as selling and buying methods are concerned. EBay is known for its auction style selling procedure and Amazon is well known for book selling. But both the online marketplaces have come a long way ahead. From Dot-Com to Web 3.0 through Web 2.0, a lot has been changed on World Wide Web and the way internet surfers behave online especially during online purchases.

If anybody asks me which WWW term is the most confusing, I would say “Web 2.0”. According to Wikipedia.org, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.” Web 2.0 revolution encourages lightweight, easy-to-use and user centric business models. In other sense we can assume that Web 2.0 ushered the era of Internet Independence. Amazon has rightly supported the Web 2.0 standards and has opened its solutions to other sellers. As a result Amazon sellers now can sell a lot variety of products apart from books.

The best thing about Amazon is that it offers a wide range of individual features to the customer that, when united, offer a very interactive experience. Due to this reason, Amazon successfully retains customers despite heavy competition from other marketplaces so far as price is concerned.

Features like Products Review, Tagging and Categorization, Product Rating, and even Product Review Rating by other customers have made Amazon a reliable source for buying and selling.

Over the course of time, a customer can build a reputation as a reviewer. This facilitates a sense of ownership on the site and encourages customers getting engaged on the site while shopping. Buyers can publish photos of the products they’ve bought. This all serves the customers by providing additional information that plays a major factor while making a purchasing decision.

But this does not stop here. An Amazon Buyer can prepare lists of various relative items that they can be recommended as a group.

This is all Open Data Contribution feature of Amazon. But Amazon also follows its buyers’ behaviour and gathers information from such buyers’ behaviour patterns. If an Amazon buyer looks at one product but ends up buying another, that’s a Data Point that can potentially control a purchasing decision for the next buyer. Amazon gathers this information and prepares a Product Ranking, along with additional information that eventually gets published along with the core product features.

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eBay Business – A Review!

I was randomly crawling through some articles related to eBay and surprisingly, I read, “eBay losing more and more business is no big surprise. eBay should be flourishing in times like these, however competition from Amazon is fierce! You can only sell so low before you both go! A few more years Amazon and eBay both will be out of business!” So far as eBay is concerned, the statistics are a bit encouraging. Since its foundation in 1995, eBay has come a long way ahead. With a global customer base of 233 million, eBay has expanded its business over 37 different countries. “While the holiday season was tough and competitive, our overall results for 2008 were strong,” said eBay Inc. President and CEO John Donahoe. “For 2008, we delivered double-digit revenue and earnings growth; made significant changes in our eBay business; and built a stronger, more diverse portfolio of leading e-commerce businesses. We will build on our strengths in 2009 while managing our business prudently in the continued challenging environment.” Due to Global Recession eBay has not achieved a substantial growth, yet more positives are expected in future, especially in 2009. Such ups and downs are a part of business and those who rely on their strengths really stand out in crowd.

EBay has completely changed the concept of business operation. It has helped numerous people realizing their dream of owning a business and not be confined to 9 to 5 jobs. Although such business is not like that your father might have owned, yet in various facets, managing business on eBay is too a profitable affair. It is profitable because you need not to invest thousands of pounds, initially. Just one computer with reliable internet connectivity, a vacant space to store items and a post box would be enough to start with. You don’t have need to rent an office space, hire professionals or many such conventional business requirements. Chiefly, there is freedom, dignity and a sense of self-fulfillment that most of the conventional business owners enjoy.

EBay has been so popular among small business owners because one can make himself/herself a big business with comparatively little investment. You may need to put some extra pound to improve your business operation efficiency and most of the amount would go for an updated computer, some basic applications and office supplies. So far we have discussed how eBay has changed the whole scenario of running a business online is cost-effective. Big players too have adopted eBay as one of their reliable resources to sell and market their products. So why wasting your time and waiting for time to change of luck! Speak to our eBay Specialist for more details on how to run an eBay business.

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Negative eBay Feedbacks – Ignorance May Damage Your Business

"Now, we have an open forum. Use it. Make your complaints in the open,” says Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar. "Better yet, give your praise in the open. Let everyone know what a joy it was to deal with someone. Above all, conduct yourself in a professional manner." This was a response from Mr. Omidyar on the crisis of eBay Feedback System. The whole situation was like that this leading premier online auction site was planning to restructure its feedback system and would ban sellers from leaving negative comments about buyers. However it would be a biased idea to comprehend that this attempt was solely taken to protect buyers from the wrath of sellers. I would like to refer one of such numerous issues sometimes ago, one eBay seller faced:

“I know the rule for removing an unwarranted feedback. Before any of your replies let me make it clear that if this is a genuine negative feedback, then I’m sorry it’s enough.

I sell cloth baby-sling and kids accessories on eBay. One of my items ended with a bidder. Bidder then said that he had got some problem with his PayPal account and pursued me to re-list that item once again. Don’t you think he would have the same PayPal problem once again and I’ll be charged the Listing fee once again? I sent an invoice through eBay twice, yet to get the reply from him. So in the end I issued an UPI and you know what I get instead is a negative feedback, “Item not received…” Don’t you think this is a kind of threat? I’m really going crazy. Please suggest me how I can remove this negative feedback as my feedback average is around 99.8%.”

I hope, Mr. Omidyar has never thought of crisis that may erupt out of this eBay Feedback system. The mere problem is lack of trust between buyers and sellers. No business can stand without buyers and this influences every business decision. So there is nothing to be surprised of Mr. Omidyar above message. But the problem is how to meet with such scenarios. Such buyer seller confrontation is not a good sign so far eBay is concerned.

As an eBay seller, your Feedback Profile values the most for your business. One Negative Feedback from certain buy could spoil your reputation and substantially damage your business, too.

To begin with always make sure you are polite to your buyers, I need not to write this due to all good sellers are well-aware of that it is vital to be polite with your buyers. If you are respectful towards them in all levels of communication then you should be able to work out any issue that you are having. Regardless of how rude the buyer is while making transactions with you always keep yourself cool and reply to them with a courteous email. If the buyer is a sensible individual then you will be able to resolve the crisis without risking your business with a negative feedback.

If still this doesn't work, there is a reason to be irritated. Well nothing to be worried about, even if the buyer leaves you a negative feedback after your polite corresponding there is still a way to get out of this negative feedback problem. The possible solution is "Mutual Feedback Withdrawal". This is where both buyers and sellers agree that the feedback is no longer justified and both parties focus on to remove the negative feedbacks.

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Amazon – A Mystery for Sellers and Buyers!

Amazon has always been a mystery for people who wish to make some extra money selling things online. It’s not the Amazon that only provides the opportunity to sell things to potential buyers, there are other popular marketplaces like eBay are too well-known. We can simply draw a comparison line between Amazon and eBay that they are into the same sector where buyers and seller explore each other for possible transactions. But both are completely different from each other so far as selling and buying methods are concerned. EBay is known for its auction style selling procedure and Amazon is well known for book selling. But both the online marketplaces have come a long way ahead. From Dot-Com to Web 3.0 through Web 2.0, a lot has been changed on World Wide Web and the way internet surfers behave online especially during online purchases.

If anybody asks me which WWW term is the most confusing, I would say “Web 2.0”. According to Wikipedia.org, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.” Web 2.0 revolution encourages lightweight, easy-to-use and user centric business models. In other sense we can assume that Web 2.0 ushered the era of Internet Independence. Amazon has rightly supported the Web 2.0 standards and has opened its solutions to other sellers. As a result Amazon sellers now can sell a lot variety of products apart from books.

The best thing about Amazon is that it offers a wide range of individual features to the customer that, when united, offer a very interactive experience. Due to this reason, Amazon successfully retains customers despite heavy competition from other marketplaces so far as price is concerned.

Features like Products Review, Tagging and Categorization, Product Rating, and even Product Review Rating by other customers have made Amazon a reliable source for buying and selling.

Over the course of time, a customer can build a reputation as a reviewer. This facilitates a sense of ownership on the site and encourages customers getting engaged on the site while shopping. Buyers can publish photos of the products they’ve bought. This all serves the customers by providing additional information that plays a major factor while making a purchasing decision.

But this does not stop here. An Amazon Buyer can prepare lists of various relative items that they can be recommended as a group.

This is all Open Data Contribution feature of Amazon. But Amazon also follows its buyers’ behaviour and gathers information from such buyers’ behaviour patterns. If an Amazon buyer looks at one product but ends up buying another, that’s a Data Point that can potentially control a purchasing decision for the next buyer. Amazon gathers this information and prepares a Product Ranking, along with additional information that eventually gets published along with the core product features.

Read More