I may need to do an ebay or craigslist mass sale soon to pare down my stuff.

I’ve also noticed that my ebizes are getting way too complicated.  In an attempt to expand them and carry more products, the businesses don’t feel streamlined.  Ideally I want to return them back to 2-3 suppliers at the most.  I want to be able to show someone how to run this business in less than an hour.  So what I’m going to do is lower my selection on a few things.  I feel that here is no need to have a supplier who only supplies 1 or 2 products in the store.  I want my store flowchart to be simple and fit on a single piece of paper.

In addition, I need to simplify my finances too.  I have way too many bank accounts.  I need to start closing some and consolidating them.  Same goes for credit cards, although the CC companies are helping me out by closing some of my accounts for me.

I based these purchases on the keyword volumes and ad competition but I don’t know if they work with actual numeric numbers.  I wonder if I should have gotten the spelled out version of the numbers too.

I made 3 of the 4 websites and just put them up.   Will report back in a few weeks.

I guess this would be a good time to talk about Mercedes customer service.  Last time I got an oil change at the dealer I got a call saying that my car was done.  When I arrived to pick it up they told me it was still being washed.  I went to the waiting room and waited about 20 minutes.  Then I walked outside and saw my car parked there.  I was upset because nobody came and told me my car was ready.  So I told the guy that I had been waiting for 20 minutes inside.  He apologized.

The next day I got one of those survey emails that asks how my service appointment went.  I gave them a bad rating due to the waiting part.  The day after the service manager called me and apologized and offered me a free detail the next time I came in.

About two weeks later, I got a call from Mercedes corporate headquarters asking me if my complaint had been resolved by the dealership and if there was anything else they could do.  So I was pretty happy about all this customer service that they were affording me.

And of course after today I am even happier…

Now regarding this warranty that I bought.  I am pretty leery of extended car warranties in general, but the SL500 NEEDS a warranty badly.  If the retractable rook ever breaks its a $4,000 minimum repair.  What I bought was an extended warranty that was sold by Mercedes dealers.  The key is to find the dealer that will sell it to you for the cheapest.  I called 5 dealers and all of them said that they would sell it to me at cost.  I was quoted $4,000, $3,800, $3,600, $3,100 for 48k miles or 48 months.  I almost bought the $3,100 warranty until someone on a Mercedes forum told me to call his dealer in Maryland.  My mistake was that I called only dealers in my area.  I would have never thought to call dealers on the east coast since I’m in Arizona.  Anyway, I called and his price was $2,400 for 48k or 48 months and that is what I bought.

What was also nice is that I didn’t even have to tell the dealer that it was under warranty.  As soon as they punched in the car their computer spit out my warranty policy number.

Now what makes this an even better deal and a no brainer to anyone reading this…

I can pay in monthly payments for 18 months and the warranty is transferrable or, I can cancel it and get a refund on any portion that I don’t use if I sell the car.

I am paying about $120 a month right now.  I’ve had the warranty for 5 months.  I’ve paid $600 so far.  I’ve had a repair that probably cost about $1500.  If I sell the car tomorrow and cancel the warranty, I can get back 43 months on my warranty.   They would have to send money back to me!

So last Saturday I was backing out of the driveway and my car suddenly wouldn’t stop.  I had to shift the car into park to stop it.  I realized that the brake pedal went all the way to the ground and the car had the stopping power of a handbrake if I mashed the pedal as hard as I could.  I’m guessing that the master cylinder just died.

I’m so glad it decided to fail as I was rolling at 5 mph in my driveway and not at 65mph on the freeway.   That would have sucked real bad.

Luckily I bought the extended warranty when I got this car and I also had the emergency roadside assistance from my car insurance.  I felt a little funny calling it an emergency as I was stranded in my driveway and couldn’t get home.  So they sent a flat bed and carted my car away to the dealer.  My warranty should cover this but I’ll have to pay a $100 deductible.  This is where I get to see if this Mercedes Platinum Warranty is worth its cost.  My Gieco roadside emergency service was already worth the price because flat bed towing is expensive!  BTW, I believe that Mercedes has their own emergency roadside assistance which is free of charge to Mercedes owners.

This was also a good time to get a new alignment done since I lowered the car about 1.5″ 3 months ago.  And the dealer owes me a free detail because I had a customer service issue the last time I was there for an oil change.

Do you consider running an online store passive?

I would answer no and yes.  I had to answer phone calls and do a few more hours of work during the month of October, but in general if you had a business that required really no more than 1 hour a day of work, wouldn’t it still be passive?

I may have worked about 40 hours in my stores last month, but that amount of work generated thousands of dollars.

Do you consider landlording a few single family homes passive income?

When I need to find a new tenant or evict a tenant, it definitely takes up more than a few hours in time.  In this market landlording is generating barely any money.  It could actually be losing money.  But in general I am finding that running an ebiz is alot less work than landlording.

I think what I’m learning is that the only real passive income is interest from the bank.

Will Halloween coming on Saturday there has been a crazy run on my stores and everyone needs the stuff yesterday.  Of course there are still those people who think that Saturday and Sunday are included in shipping days.  I can’t believe the number of people who think that!  What is stressful to me is that when a parent orders a Halloween costume for their kid and it’s last minute, I have to scramble to make sure that it will get there before Friday.  This means that I have to be on top of the dropshippers.  If they miss a day now, the order is no good to my customers if it arrives on Monday.  If they miss a day, I will have to eat the Fedex 3 day shipping price as long as the order was placed on time.

My dropshippers have never said that they will turn an order around on the same day.  So they don’t owe me if they can’t do it.  But I feel I owe it to my customers to get their orders to them on time within reason.  Most orders coming in now are Next Day or 2nd Day Air and when people pay $30-$50 for shipping, they expect it to ship within 24 hours.

I knew that this would have and the same thing will happen at Christmas time too.  On the flipside, it’s nice to have so many sales but it does turn the stores into a full time job for a few weeks out of the year.

If you don’t see the blog URL on here it means that I have removed it.  Please leave a comment with your email and I will email it to you.

I put a single page site up on both of these URLs on Saturday night.  On these pages I put up a cheesy landing page ad like the one below.  I  added a stock graphic and a big obnoxious CLICK HERE TO BUY button.   The button linked to my ebiz stores on the exact product ie. red cellphones.

I got them indexed on Sunday and they showed up on Google on the 10th page for their domain name keyword.  They had no traffic on Day 1.  Monday they both showed up on page 1 in Google.  Yesterday one is ranked #3 and the other is at #7.   Both had decent traffic and much of the traffic passed through and into my store.  I checked my analytics and the pages made two sales already.  Success already.

But guess what is even better?  I am taking up the #3 position for the keyword which means a competitor of mine has been pushed onto page 2.  Better yet, if you search for red cell phones the top 3 positions are taken up by my sites.  I have 30% of the results for red cellphones.  That’s even better than ranking just #1 for it.  I have other sites gaining on this term and will probably get 5 out of 10 on page 1.

What I was taught in my SEO class was that getting your one money site to #1 on google isn’t enough, you want all 10 spots if possible.  But you can’t do that with one site, you must make others.

For anyone who didn’t get it, I used red cellphones as an example.  No I do not rank 1-3 for red cellphones.