A Place to Sell Projects

[DaveO]

Jon, read through the discussions that have already been started and then let your thoughts fly. The whole topic needs a good kick in the pants to get started up again.
Also anyone else who is continuing to add good suggestions and thought to this thread, we welcome your thoughts in the .COM forum, please join us.
Dave

 

[SteveColes]

Jon, read through the discussions that have already been started and then let your thoughts fly. The whole topic needs a good kick in the pants to get started up again.
Also anyone else who is continuing to add good suggestions and thought to this thread, we welcome your thoughts in the .COM forum, please join us.
Dave

Dave, the software that sends the group leader(s) a notice when somebody request to join is not installed, yet. so you and Mike need to monitor your usergroup join requests manually. I approved 2 this morning.

 

[Dusty Sawyer]

OK, I have to weigh in on this one.

Being a commerical web applications engineer and EBay seller, I have a few tidbits of information that might be of value in the decision making process.

There are two ways to approach an online sale. First is the outright method of setting up your own website to sell your wares. The positive here is that there are several free and very functional online suites available to build your site and maintain it easily. The downside is that you may have a problem getting the search engines to list your site high in the search results. Consider what you might type into Google to search for the projects you want to sell, and then look at the number of returns in the upper right corner. There are professionals who make a career out of the science of getting clients to the top of the search rankings.

The second approach is somewhat of a partnership agreement with an established online business; Amazon, Buy.com or EBay for example. I'll use EBay as an example. EBay provides tons and tons of seller resources both for free, pay-per-service, and monthly agreement basis. Remember, they exist for the $ made off the sales, so the easier it is for volume and large ticket item sellers to use the site..... easy math.

At the level most of us recognize, you post your items for a set period of time for a fixed price or auction. You can also offset some of your costs by hosting the pictures on your own website. Add to that the fact that you can include very attractive graphics and features to the advert that will increase sales. One further level is the EBay Store. If you have ever seen a link to "Visit this seller's store", you know what this buys you; A gallery of rich text and graphics for multiple items. You add as much description and as many pictures as you want. Beauty is, it can be added to an existing website that already has search traffic, like this one !!!!

On a final note, doing research on what items sell for and whether they sell or not is easy to conduct on EBay. Log in with your account, go to advanced search, type in the same search criteria you used earlier, and click on "Completed Listings Only". This will give you whether or not the items are selling, and if so, for how much. Note also the format of the adverts for what is selling vs. what is not. Another route to go is to hire a Seller's Assistant. They do take a chunk of the profits, but get the whole process off to a running start.

Ah, and the last; the cost for a good initial setup should be around $50/month exclusive of any selling fees and shipping expenses.

Ok, there's my ha'penny's worth.

David

 

[SteveColes]

David, for my information, even if no one cares, can you point me to some of the type online suites, you are thinking of? I was looking for one that met the functional specs, I have in my head, sort of:lol:

..................
The positive here is that there are several free and very functional online suites available to build your site and maintain it easily. ..........
David

 

[Dusty Sawyer]

Steve,

Gladly. I am most familiar with the hosting providor GoDaddy which provides "Website Tonight" and "DotNetNuke" (DNN). DNN is a pumped up offshoot from the old MS Community Server and has built-in PayPal support. The neat thing I have found with DNN is that there are tons of cheap and rich add-ins that people have coded in the $20 - $65 range.

I also like the type of package that Shop-Script offers. They are at http://www.shop-script.com/products.html. Especially that you can start with thier free version!!!!

Speaking of site building, what are we using here and do you have the ability to tweek the meta-tags?

Thanks for asking

David

 

[SteveColes]

I'm to repeat a post I made earlier in this thread with some things edited so that my points are made clearer.

I will provide a domain name
ncwoodworker.xxx
xxxxxxx.ncwoodworker.net
ncwoodworking.xxx

Those are all owned by me already, so they are available.

I will provide web hosting for it no charge, for a year. After that it is open for renegotiation.

Those who are interested create a formal group of some kind with a Governing Council that makes executive type of decisions, etc.

The store front serves as a display case for individual members. In general the actual sales and their negotiations take place between buyer and seller. Though, the website may provide tools for invoicing and collection. The expenses of this method are not paid by sales revenues. Each member pays "dues", if your dues are up to date, your work is displayed, if not then it isn't. I can set up a dues pay system on this web site very easily.
Now the bad news. There are startup and continuing expenses. You may have to pay for a:

Web designer

Webmaster

Various software purchases

You must have a:

Web Designer
Web Implementer
Webmaster

They could be the same person, but you want a real web designer to do the job. There are members on this site who have the skill set but whether or not they will volunteer ???

Finally, you Must have advertising. No matter what you think, the search engines just do not pick you up and present you. If you do all the right things it will take six months. Your first best bet is probably "Goggle Ad Words" and that will cost you at least $150 a month. But from my experience to get the get coverage you will need $300/month is more realistic and then you will want to place ads with a small set of good websites and I really have no idea what the costs there will be.

So assuming you get a volunteer webmaster and web designer, then you better budget $300 - $600/ month for advertising and development costs for the first six months.

Now, how would I get this thing started.

1 Create a closed user group called .COM -DONE:yes4lo: :laugh8kb:
2. Start collecting dues, NOW. It can be a small amount, say $5 -$10 month. That gets you a head start on the money you will need. And it proves who is serious and who is not. You do this by restricting access to .COM UG to people who have paid their dues.
3. Put someone in charge who will take the bull by the horns and start to get things done.

My $1.00 worth.:eusa_danc
I'm going to repost this in the .com Forum

 

[SteveColes]

Hi all,
One thing I haven't seen anyone bring up is advertising for the new site. There are untold number of websites out there on the web and over 3.6 million under the search criteria of "handcrafted wood items for sale".

One thing we must be ready to do is to advertise to the point that everytime you you type in a search in Google, Yahoo, MSN, ALTAVISTA, and the rest of the top 10 search engines, your site comes up in the top 10-20 sites brought up. People don't want to go thru page after page of returns.

This kind of advertising can be expensive, but it will give you great returns. After the site is up and running, and the sales are coming in, the money will also be coming in to support continued advertising, and so on.
This is just another outlay that will have to be made BEFORE while the site is starting up!

Another thing that we need to think about is are we going to take sales from this site or act as a referral site to the owner of the item up for sale.

If we are going to sell it right from the site, how is payment to be made and in whose name? I will let you guys debate that one! It opens a number of large cans of worms.

Just a few thoughts I thought I would throw out there.

You are right on the money. Pun intended:rolleyes5cz:

 

[SteveColes]

. Start collecting dues, NOW. It can be a small amount, say $5 -$10 month. That gets you a head start on the money you will need. And it proves who is serious and who is not. You do this by restricting access to .COM UG to people who have paid their dues.]

Wow, did that stop discussion :shocked7fl: :rolleyes5cz:

 

[SteveColes]

Steve,

Gladly. I am most familiar with the hosting providor GoDaddy which provides "Website Tonight" and "DotNetNuke" (DNN). DNN is a pumped up offshoot from the old MS Community Server and has built-in PayPal support. The neat thing I have found with DNN is that there are tons of cheap and rich add-ins that people have coded in the $20 - $65 range.

I also like the type of package that Shop-Script offers. They are at Online store software powered by PHP and MySQL - Shop-Script. Especially that you can start with thier free version!!!!

Speaking of site building, what are we using here and do you have the ability to tweek the meta-tags?

Thanks for asking

David

Those that are dependent on Godaddy doing the hosting, I think would have to be eliminated. Since my proposal is me to host the site using one of my domains. The other one you mentioned I will download and take a look at.

As far as the questions about this site, I'll answer in a different thread so we don't clutter this one up.:yes4lo: