It is a classified site, determined by location where every post is no longer than 140 characters long. They try to keep it anonymous by giving you as many options to let buyers contact you as possible including Twitter and Facebook.

You can post “Haves” which are items you are looking to sell or give away or “Wants” which are items that you are looking to buy. The system will let you know when they find matches for either post and then buyers can contact you via Facebook, Twitter, SMS or email.

In their own words:

Tell us what you ‘Want’ or ‘Have’ in a sentence. The YHIW matching system will continuously analyze other messages as they come in and present you with the ones that match your requirement.

If you are online, you will be able to chat directly & anonymously with the other matching user through the YHIW Chat system (or telephone). else we can relay their message to you via Email/SMS/Facebook/Twitter/RSS.

You dont have to search every day, we will search for you. You connect directly and instantly with the other person, and your Identity is revealed to the other party only when you decide.

No Spam. No Scams. Connect, Communicate and Decide, How you want to take it forward

I logged in to the Beta version of the site. Now I understand how the site is supposed to work and also that they are in Beta so I want to give them the benefit of the doubt that everything is not yet up in working condition. Right now, there isn’t a whole lot of point to the site other than really short classifieds but I can see some potential.

For instance, if I listed a Have and the site could automatically tweet out that item on my Facebook and Twitter accounts (which I would have linked in this scenario, something you can’t do with the site now), they they provide a fee free platform where a user could see my tweet and Facebook post, click through to the YHIW post and then contact me anonymously through the method of their choice.

But even as I say that, I can’t see how this site offers me anything more than simply posting my “Have” on Twitter and Facebook directly would give me. I like the idea of posting wants, especially as a collector, I have a long list of wants I’d love to post somewhere but I’m still not sure what edge this free site gives me over just posting it myself somewhere random.

And how anonymous is their contact if they are contacting me through Facebook or Twitter? Aren’t they seeing my username in either case?

In summation, I do think that the idea is very cool. People have long been trying to come up with a reliable way to buy and sell over sites like Twitter and Facebook and this is definitely a step in the right direction. But as the site is right now in Beta, it seems kinda, well, pointless. But I’m hoping that will change as the site moves out of Beta.

I am going to ask the staff member who contacted me to give us a little more info on how they plan for the site to work in the future in the comments but, in the meantime, the site is free to try so please feel free to play around with it. Maybe I am just missing the potential so please feel free to enlighten me below.

I know I’m not the only seller with a similar postcard though I am proud to say mine is much less threatening and/or whining about feedback than most out there. The crux of it is, we are working really hard to get your good feedback and if you think you can’t give it, please at least let us know when so we can adjust how we do business. Or give you a refund to make you happy, etc.

I also created a similar message as a part of our shipment follow-up email. So we were giving buyers a reminder about this on two fronts.

Sidenote: I do not believe buyers intentionally are malicious on feedback stars. I think most genuinely have no idea how the feedback system affects sellers so my philosophy is to simply remind and/or teach them about how it works rather than threaten/whine about it. I know us sellers live and breathe feedback but it is a very different world out there as a buyer and we have to remember that. I think 95% of feedback issues come out of ignorance of the system and nothing else.

Anyway, my email and insert worked. How do I know they worked? Simply, for the year plus since I have been using them, I have had higher star ratings and the few unhappy buyers emailed me before feedback and each one specifically mentioned the insert (such as “Your note says to contact you if I was unhappy so I wanted to just say….” etc). I was pleased with the results, my feedback was good, my customers were happy and everything was sunshine and roses. Even the issues we never totally resolved we still talked over and somewhat diffused.

In the beginning of Feb, we got a neutral feedback which is something I hadn’t seen since we started the feedback messaging. It was because of a mistake on our part, one I would have immediately fixed if given the chance. I emailed the buyer, nice as anything, and just said that, in the future, with me or any other seller, you can always just email the seller before leaving feedback and most will make the issue right. Buyer and I get to talking and she apologizes and says she didn’t realize she could email me. I ask if she saw my package insert. She did, she tells me, but she threw it out without reading it. We part on good terms, hopefully she’ll buy from me again but I am annoyed to have been 1 starred on a miscommunication for obvious reasons.

I don’t think much of this until, a few weeks later, a buyer left us a positive feedback with a complaint in it and, sure enough, our dashboard shows a low rating for the relevant star for that period. It was a simple issue, buyer misread description but instead of just emailing us, left feedback first. I emailed this buyer in the same vein but this time got no reply at all.

Then we had this guy.

Now today I get another neutral. Neutrals are not the end of the world but when you haven’t seen one in a long time *and* when it reflects buyers suddenly leaving less than ideal feedback without so much as a word to you first, I find it worrying. This one, the buyer had two complaints. First was that we didn’t ship while our office was closed which, what do you want from me? We had a warning up not to buy if you weren’t OK with delayed shipping but I know there is nothing you can do about bad feedback resulting from vacation. But even that, I would have been happy to talk it out or issue a partial refund, etc HAD I BEEN FREAKIN’ CONTACTED FIRST!! (Also, her complaint was that shipping was slow. International order. Shipped March 3rd, arrived on March 8th. That is amazingly impossibly fast for international shipping, can I just point out.)

Anyway, the second part of her complaint is that the item got damaged in shipment. This is pretty cut and dry, we could have just replaced it or done the insurance claim depending on the extent. But again, we weren’t contacted.

Now this is not to say that these 4 are the only customer issues we have had recently. There have been others that were resolved perfectly happily.

So after over a year of our messaging to contact us before leaving feedback working like a charm, suddenly we’ve had four cases (spread out by months but still closer together than I would like) where the buyer has left less than ideal feedback without so much as saying one word to us or giving us a chance to do anything. We also know that at least one of these people looked at our package insert but didn’t read and/or process it at all.

The questions at hand then is: are buyers becoming feedback plea blind? Have we as sellers inundated them with so many feedback pleas and reminders that they are just ignoring all of them? Why did this work for so long, only to stop working so suddenly? Now, obviously, these buyers are a small minority out of many others who are emailing first, are not leaving feedback at all or are leaving good feedback but a few little things can sometimes point to the start of a bigger trend. Or is this just a random fluke with a couple of cranky people who just didn’t feel like reading our messages?

So let me ask you: What measures did you take to keep your DSR ratings up and are these measures still working?

• Firstly, more like Amazon Marketplace, A1 (as A1Books) itself also sells on its own items on the marketplace so you are competing with their new items on price if it is an item they also sell. That said, they don’t sell every item so there is no new item competition on many items.
• Secondly, their fees are lower than many other places with the only fee being a 10% end of listing fee.
• Unlike Half.com which limits you to items already in the catalog or Amazon which requires you to pay a monthly fee to be able to add to their catalog, adding a new product on A1 Marketplace is new which can be very helpful, I have found.

Side note: I used to use A1 Marketplace for many years but they recently changed their requirements for keeping your account active. I cannot find where these requirements are listed but my account seemed to be deleted or deactivated everytime I logged in to add a new item so I finally got fed up and gave up after having to reactivate and recreate a new account a few times. I only had under 5 items listed with them so this may not be an issue for larger Media sellers but they were annoying the snot out of me with this procedure so I no longer sell there.

But the biggest thing that sets this marketplace apart from the others out there is that they are now offering free storefronts for sellers. While these will obviously be for Media items, the announcement makes it seem like they will soon be expanding into non-media products in the future products.

From their FAQ:

What is a seller store?
A seller store is a free feature that we are offering for now to our sellers. They will be able to have a personalized URL in which they can display on social networking sites, marketing materials and more.

What is my personalized URL?
Your URL will be www.a1books.com/store/yoursellernickname. For example A1Promo would be www.a1books.com/store/a1promo

While many media stores let you link to the list of only your items, this might be a great opportunity for media sellers to get their own customizable e-store for free.

Here is the official announcement.

I no longer have an account there so I cannot try this out to review it but if you decide to play around with this free store option, please let us know what you think below.

What was the first item I sold? I really don’t remember. I didn’t realize I would still be at this gig 13 years later or I would have taken notice. I kinda wish I knew what it was but I really don’t remember. It’s a safe bet it was some kind of My Little Pony.

For those of you curious and who also want to feel old (or perhaps young, depending on who is reading this) when I listed that very first eBay item I was 17 years old and a junior in high school. An entrepreneur before a high school graduate. Not bad, eh?

I was only newly legally able to drive but I was not actually old enough to have an account on eBay (had to be 18) so I was selling under my father’s name. I would answer customer emails after I finished my homework and go to flea markets on the weekends to find stuff to sell. I didn’t have a credit card so I used my dad’s and then paid him back for the fees as we were billed. I used to list items on our family computer in our television room (the only computer we owned). I would have to list items in bulk because we didn’t own a digital camera at the time so my dad would borrow one from work on the weekends, I would photo items like crazy so he could return it each Monday. When a phone call cut off the modem while I was in the middle of listing an item and I would lose all the work I just did, I would scream like anything. Dial-up, man, I do NOT miss it.

I told my mom to buy eBay stock before they went public. She didn’t. We could have been rich. We bust her about this to this day.

It’s a little crazy to think that signing up for eBay all those years ago and putting something up for sale would still have such an effect on my life 13 years later but here we are.

So here’s to lucky 13!

Yeah, I scheduled those blog posts to post while I was gone so I was blogged while I wasn’t actually here. That’s how I roll.

My husband and I just returned from a lovely 12 day vacation which was very much needed as we hadn’t been on a vacation since Fall of 2008 so it was well overdue.

As you may recall, I wrote this post musing about the damage that vacation can do to your feedback and I regretfully report that, though I’ve only been back a few hours, the first of the damage from going on vacation has already made itself known. I tried my best with auto replies on every email, a vacation responder on out site and store and I even emailed every buyer who bought from us in the last few weeks ahead of time to let them know replies would be delayed.

On Feb 28th, a buyer emailed threatening bad feedback on an issue that I would have been happy to grant a refund on to save both the feedback and the customer but I had checked email that morning and didn’t check it again until I returned just now. Of course, as he threatened he would, he left a single star rating because I didn’t answer him right away. He apologized in a later email saying he realized that was jerk of him since he knew I wasn’t in the office to answer him and he actually liked the item after all but there is the nasty little rating all the same and no amount of apologies is going to remove it.

I was trying to only check email every few days to not work too much and this is the thanks I get, eh?

Do I care? Only on some far away “principal of the thing” level. I know that I wouldn’t have gotten that rating if I’d been on normal work duty so it’s a direct result of my vacation. If the only cost to my business is that one bad rating for a whole week of vacation, it seems a fair trade. Of course, it remains to be seen what all the other people who ignored the vacation messages decide to do when they get their items but let’s keep our fingers crossed that the damage is minimal.

I just thought it was funny that even though I checked email and worked over vacation, a problem still snuck in under the radar just as I feared. Oh well, what can you do?

Last week, I found this postcard in my PO Box. Maybe things like this are common in your line of work but this made me stand back and say, huh?

The front was one of those pre-paid postcards with our address scrawled crookedly across the page.

Here is the back:

This postcard contains only one sentence, squished onto the top of the postcard even though there is a ton of room below.

It reads:

Gentlemen: Please send to me an LP catalog listing. Thank you.

Then on the bottom is a sticker with a PO Box address.

I have ranted before about that fact that I am not one man, let alone multiple men and I cannot stand being referred to as “Sirs” or “Gentlemen” but let’s let that slide.

Assuming LP refers to the records we were selling for a client, I have several questions.

• Firstly, the only way you would know that I am selling records is if you saw them in our eBay store because we don’t have them listed anywhere else. If you’ve seen them, then you’ve seen our entire catalog. I don’t keep some extra stash of records hidden hoping to sell them only to someone sends me a random sketchy handwritten postcard. Did you really send me a postal mailing to ask me to email you a link to a bunch of listings you already looked at? That doesn’t make any sense at all. If you were on our store, why didn’t you just email us while you were there?
• Secondly, the only contact info on this card is a PO Box. If there had been an email or a phone number, I would have been happy to email or call this person and at least see what they were after but I’m certainly not going to mail someone a print out of my store when my inventory changes daily and items I print today probably won’t even be on sale by the time postal mail gets there. Why wouldn’t you give me some kind of means to contact you besides inefficient snail mail? Especially since what you want isn’t clear. I’m not going to pay for a stamp to write you a letter to say, “Huh?”
• Thirdly, there is a ton of room on that postcard. How about a little more info? Who are you? Why do you want to know about records? Are you, in fact, talking about records? There are millions of bits of info this sender could have given me that might have convinced me that he was worth writing back but all he gave me was one awkward sentence. Since none of this makes sense and I don’t know for sure who is is or what he wants, my motivation to write him back (since there is no other contact info) is non-existent.

How would you handle this?

Newly released books are often free for a limited time when they first come out and I like grabbing them to read later or at least peruse. I also like to request previews to see if I will like the whole book, even if I’m only going to take it out of the library. I do this frequently and yet, I don’t own a Kindle.

Luckily, you don’t actually need a Kindle to read Kindle books. So if you want to pop over to Amazon and download all the free books while they are free, you can and still be able to read them. If you later decide to buy a Kindle, no problem, you can still sync any books your download now as well as bookmarks and notes you make on them to your Kindle if you want to.

How do I read Kindle books without a Kindle? Well, you have a few choices.

Kindle for PC
By far the easiest option, this simple and free download just takes a click and then you can access the entire Kindle library on your computer. Hundreds of free and cheap books are immediately available for your perusal and you can read them all on your computer screen. The best part about Kindle for PC is that you can use it on multiple computers and it will sync all your notes and bookmarks between them all. I like this because I can read a chapter of a book at lunch time at one computer, say, at work, and then later at home continue from where I left off. Lots to like there.

Kindle Apps for your cell phone or music device
While a Kindle Android App is still in the works, there is already a free Kindle App for your Apple products and Kindle for Blackberry which means that if you have any Blackberry or Apple phone including the iPhone or any other Apple enable device such as the iPad, iPhone Touch or similar, you have access to all the features of a Kindle there too. Amazon has been pretty committed to getting a Kindle app on every major cell phone or hand-held device with app support which is a very good thing because it lets you carry all your books in your pocket. While reading on your cell phone may not be your eye’s top choice, your cell phone or music device is the item your most likely to have handy at all times which makes this a very useful option.

The gist of this postcard is as follows. They want me to recycle any mail I get in my PO Box and they are providing a box to allow me to do so while still protecting my privacy. The rest is all rah rah environment, etc.

Except, they printed up hundreds and hundreds of post cards to encourage me to recycle. The irony of the amount of paper and resources they wasted to get this message out when a poster or two in the PO Box lobby would have done the same is, on its own, astonishing. But, OK, I have to appreciate the idea behind the gesture.

Now, I am a big conservationist. I usually take my PO Box junk mail home specifically so I can recycle it so I was pleased to hear that I could recycle it right there in the post office.

So I turned around to put this card and my other junk mail in the previously mentioned blue recycling container. I looked in the lobby. I looked under the tables. I finally went into the post office proper and looked all over that office, including under the tables. There was no blue container. Expanding my definition of “blue container” I looked for anything with the promised Recycle words on it and still found nothing.

When I returned to the lobby, I finally realized why so many of these “Thank you for helping the Postal Service do its part to protect the environment!” cards were all over the floor. There was also a trash can in the lobby and in there, amidst the discarded soda bottles and other trash, were hundreds more of these paper cards.

So let’s review. The post office used tons of resources to print up hundreds of cards encouraging people to recycle and then didn’t even put out the bins they promised to put out so that we could even attempt to recycle the card telling us to recycle. This is beyond sad.

OK, maybe they sent the cards out early and the bins are coming at a later day. There is still no excuse for this mess.

So while I brought my card home to scan in for you and then recycle, most other post office patrons either just simply threw the card in the trash or, flummoxed by the lack of promised box, threw it on the floor. I can’t help but feel we missed the boat a bit on this effort, guys!

If this is the Post Office’s part in helping the environment, I’d hate to see their part in hurting it!

Unlike a lot of new marketplaces, they actually had a lot of people buying and selling the exact kinds of items I usually sell (collectibles) so that was a big selling point for me as a buyer and seller both. Then I got really ticked at the platform because of a security flaw so I deleted my account entirely before I really got to give it an honest try. (In the interest of clarity, this was about a year ago so they have likely fixed this security flaw by now, I haven’t checked. It also may be something that normal people would have considered a minor thing and I may be a diva. No one can say for sure. )

But I still thought the marketplace had a lot of potential and I wanted to find out more about whether it was worth starting up a presence on eCrater. So I have enlisted Stacy Anderson (on Twitter as @itsmestacy) who has found success selling online on both eBay and eCrater to give us a review from the perspective of someone who has used eCrater extensively. Selling clothing out of Fort Worth, Texas, Stacy has been selling on eBay since July 2000 and on her own eCrater websites TheCheapSkirt.com and TheUglySweaterShop.com for a few months now.

I’d really like to thank you for joining us on the blog today to share your experiences. First thing, can you tell you a little about yourself and how you got started selling online.

I started selling just things I had but no longer needed around my house 10 years ago. I was amazed because back then you could put a pair of used Levis on eBay and get $20 for them, without even having a picture. This was about $19.50 more than you’d get for them at a garage sale. Back then, auctions were the only way to buy on eBay and it was exciting starting something out at a penny and seeing the price go up. (That doesn’t happen very often on eBay in the clothing categories anymore, I’d say not for the past 5 years or so.)

I was living in Wisconsin at the time and had access to a lot of Green Bay Packers related items, and breweriana (everyone had beer signs in their basements up there), so I did sell a little of both in addition to clothing, but after I moved to Texas 3 years ago I began to focus primarily on clothing, shoes and accessories.

Was the move to eCrater motivated out of anything specific that happened on eBay or were you just trying out other things?

EBay’s price changes were a bit like the story of the frog and the boiling pot of water for me. A little increase here, a little increase there, I thought I could take them in stride.

But as the fees went up for me, search visibility went down as did sales. I found myself doing more and more advertising and legwork to bring in customers. Auctions would end with only one bidder, if that. Store items were difficult for buyers to find in search. Once Google stopped accepting individual feeds to Google Base (which was my main source of eBay store traffic), my sales were nearly at a standstill.

I decided that if I were going to to do the legwork to bring buyers to my items, it wasn’t worth it for me to pay eBay. I’d looked at their “job” as my advertising, and when it came to store items, they weren’t doing their job.

So I moved my store items to TheCheapSkirt.com at eCrater. And on that particular store, I can safely say that I haven’t sold any more or less there than I had been selling out of my store at eBay. So I wouldn’t call it a success, other than the fact I’ve saved on fees for those items that have sold.

However…

Sort of on a lark, around Halloween I opened TheUglySweaterShop.com, another eCrater store, primarily as a resource for people who needed something truly awful for an Ugly Sweater Party.

I’d blogged an “ugly sweater of the week” for a while and got a bit of a response, so when I’d see one when I was out on an inventory run, I’d pick it up. Pretty soon I had quite a “collection”, and I started listing them.

I realized that with a relatively new web presence, I wouldn’t rank high in Google searches, so I turned to social media instead. I started Tweeting about these ugly sweaters. I started a Facebook Fan page. I listened to my customers: they would lament that the sweaters on eBay were always too expensive, and I listed mine for less. I posted links to Ugly Sweater Party charity events. I retweeted pictures people had posted on Twitter of themselves modeling their own ugly sweaters. I became involved in the “ugly sweater community”, as it were.

Within 2 weeks my page views had skyrocketed. In the 6-week peak “ugly sweater” selling season, I had over 30,000 page views and had sold more than 75% of what I had listed, with emails and tweets asking for more. I couldn’t keep up! I was so unprepared for the success! And 75% of those page views came via Google (eCrater uploads a listing feed to Google Base 2x a week automatically for all of their stores–they became a Product Search Marketplace Partner with Google in November of 2009).

In comparison, I had one tacky Christmas sweater listed on eBay as a fixed price listing for a month. Only 40 page views. In an entire month. AND I was a Top Rated Seller at the time.

I moved it to TheUglySweaterShop.com and it sold within 24 hours and I had emails asking about it from others who also wanted it and missed out.

I know I brought you in to talk about eCrator but you just gave us some fantastic examples of using social networking to build a business that really should be highlighted. I want to go back to your great ideas there in another post for sure but for now, let’s move on to … What sets eCrater apart from the other selling platforms out there?

Well, it is free. Free is good. And it is simple–there is no HTML in the listings (some may see that as a drawback, but I’ve seen so many poorly-formatted eBay listings that I find a text description to be very easy on the eyes).

They are a Google Product Search Marketplace Provider which, as I stated before, had a great bearing on the amount of traffic my eCrater stores have been getting. They have a fully integrated Google Checkout, so there is no fiddling with buttons/waiting for Google to approve your site, etc.

They are responsive to user requests. In the past I’ve asked them to add categories in their store structure, and they were added within days. They were very responsive. I’ve also requested an erroneous feedback be removed from my account, and they were quick to address that as well. Worlds apart from eBay in that regard!

I think eCrater is a great place to get a feel for how it would feel to sell somewhere other than eBay if you’ve only sold there. I learned all about Google Checkout via eCrater, including coupon codes, promotions, etc.

Some people I think confuse eCrater with eBay in that they think they can list things there and just “sit” on them, and the traffic will come in. It doesn’t work that way. Yes, people can shop all eCrater stores from the main eCrater.com page (think of that as an online mall of sorts), but the majority of traffic comes from people finding you from somewhere else. I’d say less than 1% of my traffic comes directly from eCrater, and those most likely are from postings on their message boards.

What do you feel like eCrater could improve on?

I’ve asked them to look into issues I’ve run across: I can’t seem to get some of the calculated international shipping options to work properly, their USPS Express Mail service states it is 1 day shipping time, which can be misleading to customers who are in areas where it takes 2 days for Express Mail (I asked them to switch it to 1-2 days after I refunded a disappointed customer who lived in a 2-day area who needed an item for a party and it arrived a day late).

Also if two people buy the exact same thing within minutes of each other, it can show as “double ordered”–had that happen a few times during the peak of “ugly sweater season” because traffic in my store was *that* brisk!

Although I’d like to see some more “customizability” (is that a word?)[Ed note: It is now! ] in my store (layouts, the look of the landing page, etc), I realize it is a free site and the more bells and whistles they add, the more support they need and that costs money. I’m glad to see they put the focus on supporting the functionality of the site, rather than on making it prettier. If your core functions don’t work (like we’ve seen with eBay’s search), then it doesn’t matter how pretty something is if nobody will see it.

Where else have you sold? How do those other marketplaces compare to eCrater or even eBay?

I was a very early member of Bonanzle, but stopped selling there once they implemented a fee structure. Initially I was drawn to them the same reason I was drawn to ecrater: the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) approach they had to the site with no HTML in listings, ease of use, etc. Then with the fees they also started to move away from that, and since I hadn’t gotten any traffic in a few months, I didn’t feel it was right for me.

I have and still sell books on Amazon.com, but from my own personal stash. I love to read!

I used to sell on Half.com but since they merged their feedback in with eBay’s, I became concerned, as people are more likely to leave neutrals there and just one or two bad ratings can put my selling status on eBay at risk now that I’ve gone from a Powerseller to a small volume seller.

I used Auctiva to list on eBay and prior to eCrater, had considered getting one of their off-eBay store packages, but then they had that nasty situation with a virus that I didn’t feel was handled well, along with the way they implemented their fee increase (fee schedules changing almost daily, pressure to “lock in” a rate before it changed–total hard sell) and I no longer felt comfortable entrusting my business to them.

Putting your loyalties as a seller aside, which is your favorite online store to shop at and why?

Amazon.com, hands down. Mostly because I’ve talked my family members into making wish lists, so Christmas shopping is a breeze! They all live across the country so I just click, pay and have it shipped out!

With a depressed economy and all the changes in retail happening all the time, where do you see your business in 5 years? How are you adapting?

I don’t see myself as an online clothing magnate in 5 years, or anything so grand. I just feel fortunate to be able to do this as my primary source of income for the past two years. Despite our current economic crunch, I truly believe that by working for myself, the only thing that could be holding me back from more success is myself. That is why I’ve continually reassessed my business model and make changes, rather than pine for “the lost days of eBay”, a rut I see some of my fellow sellers get stuck in.

I’ve been recently starting on yet ANOTHER business model, this one ironically going back to using eBay as it will be auction-based, rather than fixed price. I don’t see it supplanting my other two stores, rather it will supplement them. I’m finding diversification makes me feel safest–not keeping all my eggs in one basket, so to speak.

Before next fall, I may move TheUglySweaterShop.com to its own space with its own shopping cart, as I feel it may have outgrown eCrater. I’d like to be able to better integrate my Ugly Sweater blog at uglysweaters.wordpress.com with the sales portion of the site, as well as make it more visually appealing and fun to shop. Another former eBay clothing seller, ShopNastyGal.com, is a great inspiration for me, she seems to have transitioned VERY successfully from eBay to a stand-alone site and has a great social media following. I think social media is a very inexpensive way to market and to keep in touch with what people really want.

I honestly see Google as the key to getting buyers in the future, as long as eBay is more and more cumbersome to weed through. I think it will matter less where your items are, and more than they are found by buyers. I actually searched for something on eBay today, and got a message that “Your search could not be performed at this time. Please try again later.” I tried it again later, and got the same message. I found what I was looking for on Google instead.

—

I really want to thank Stacy for taking the time to answer my questions. I wanted to be able to give the platform a thorough review and evaluation and am very glad she was able to stop in and give us the in-depth perspective of someone doing some selling “in the trenches” as it were.

But what about you? Have you sold on eCrater? What were your experiences with the marketplace? Has Stacy convinced you to give it another try?

But as any online seller knows, there is a certain amount of stress involved with leaving your business for even a day. Sure, I’ll be checking email whenever we go but running a business is a full time job so you’d either need to work full time while on vacation or just commit to letting things slide for a few days. And maybe I’m a control freak but there is no one I can leave behind to babysit the business that is a substitute for me.

I’m running around like a headless chicken trying to deal with all the problems that I know will pop-up if I leave…

• a buyer wants to return an item and gets upset because I don’t email him back seconds later
• someone who asked to return an item weeks ago finally gets around to returning it and wants his refund ASAP
• a buyer buys something while I’m gone and wants to know why it wasn’t shipped already
• a good business opportunity crops up while I’m away (new client, new connection, etc) and by the time I email them back, I’ve missed my chance

Now, sure, I can set an email auto-reply to try to head off some of these problems. I can set a vacation notice on my store that lets buyers know that they can browse, but to expect a delay in shipping if they buy. I can email everyone with an outstanding issue to head questions off at the pass.

But let’s be honest, I’ve done all of these things and there is always still the buyer or client who ignores the emails completely and still freaks out because I wasn’t at their instant beck and call so stress is still very much a factor. People also both ignore or miss your auto-replies and have no concept of time and expect you to be back before your vacation is up. We’ve all experienced the buyer that works his or herself into a frenzy with 20 emails sent in less than 24 hours because they didn’t get a response.

Now my Amazon sales are going to be fine, all I do is source my products to Amazon and they handle everything else so they can babysit themselves while I’m gone which is a huge selling point of that marketplace. Worst thing that happens is that Amazon runs out of stock but I can just send them more when I get back.

But let’s talk about how buyers freaking out because you are away translates into feedback on other marketplaces. Now I’m obviously talking specifically about eBay as we get into a discussion DSRs but I think that bad feedback due to buyer misunderstanding applies in any circumstance, no matter what the platform. Is it worth it to sweat any bad feedback that might result for taking a break or should you just be zen that misunderstandings are going to happen but you shouldn’t let them ruin your vacation? Do you just work a certain number of low DSRs into your calculations for the month and figure it will all come out in the wash at the end? Should you be sitting on the beach, worrying about what your buyers are thinking?

Now, I know what I am going to do. I’m going to take any precautions that I can and then just be zen about it. It may mean a little bit of stressing before the vacation to get my replacements, auto-emails and other details in order but it gives me the feeling (however deluded) of being to kick back while actually on vacation without stressing.

My philosophy has always been that there is no feedback bad enough that it won’t get buried but good feedback in a few weeks and that philosophy still applies with Top-Rated and DSRs because of the rule of averages. So if someone wants to ding me while I’m gone even after all my efforts and I can’t fix/retract it upon my return, eh. It’s well worth a little time off.

But how does taking a vacation effect your business?