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My seller's profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)
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Our eBay
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My seller's
profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)
The following article was written for GoTo Auctions (formerly known as AuctionRover). The rights have reverted to the author.
This article relates to Coola, a startup that had great technology, but went under in the dot-com crash. Their pioneering work is still of importance because it indicates a unique set of business possibilities.
Most auction sellers start by making to-do lists, which grow and grow and grow. Perhaps you organize these by the kinds of things you have to sell, and/or by the series of activities involved in every sale, such as: taking digital photos, putting the photos online, entering item descriptions, sending email to winners of auctions, responding to auction-related email, packing and shipping, recordkeeping, etc.
Keep in mind that every task as three components -- the labor of deciding what to do, the labor of getting started, and the labor of doing. Try to establish habits -- repeated routines of doing this kind of task on Monday and this kind on Tuesday, and the sequence of steps that you go through. Then you can quickly deal with the first two kinds of labor. It's Monday, so this is what you should be doing; you don't have to decide. And after this, you always do that, so momentum carries from one task on to the next one, and you don't come to a standstill time after time, having to overcome inertia and get started all over again.
To establish a habit, force yourself to do a task in similar circumstances (in the same sequence with other tasks and/or on the same day of the week at about the same time of day) three times in a row. The amount of mental energy you need to expend to do it a fourth time should be miniscule next to what it was the first few times. Basically, by doing this repeatedly you have worn down your mental resistance, reduced the friction.
If you find that you are drowning in paper juggling all your auction-related tasks, try the Auction Manager at GoTo Auctions. That can speed the process of submitting and tracking your auctions and provide quick views of where all your auctions at eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo stand at any given moment, plus provide you with easy access to records you've stored in their archives.
Perhaps your to-do lists include lots of tasks in addition to auctions -- perhaps you have a life as well, with a fulltime job and a family and responsibilities. In that case, I suggest that you get a Palm Pilot, AKA "personal organizer." This is a handheld computer. The various models sell for anywhere from about $170 to $330. They are set up to make it very easy to enter and retrieve schedules, addresses/phone numbers, to-do lists, and memos. You enter info by scribbling directly on the screen with a stylus, using a shorthand "graffiti" that is very close to ordinary cursive, and that you become used to in minutes. You can even add alarms to particular items in your schedule so your Palm will beep to alert you that it's time to do something.
Use a Palm for a day and you'll become addicted. Use it for a week and the information you have stored on it will be far more valuable than the purchase price, and you'll think nothing of replacing the gadget if you should lose it, so long as you could retain the information. Fortunately, you can easily connect your Palm to your PC to backup (HotSync) your files.
Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer
Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com
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