Author Archive for ANightOwl
Elizabeth is an internet retailer with 9 years of experience. She likes her life and business organized and color-coded. She is almost constantly at her keyboard, except when she finds some time for her organic garden, the occasional cross-stitch project, and her volunteer work with Girl Scouts and Soroptimists. She is the organizer of a Procrastinating Crafters Meet-up group and is chairing the committee for the Mission Bay High School class of 1979 class reunion. She lives in San Diego with her husband and children and is the President of A Night Owl’s Treasure’s, inc.
Bonanzle: Good for Buyers and Sellers
There are so many sites to chose from when buying and selling on the internet. Today it was brought home to me again why I enjoy selling and buying on Bonanzle. Two things happened within hours of each other. They shut down some questionable seller shops, and they had a major site update.
Bonanzle has standards it expects all it’s sellers to uphold. Sellers trying to flog knock-offs are not welcome. Sellers that are scam-artists are not welcome. Sometimes the community of sellers spots the bad apples, and sometimes management does. Once they are identified the seller is given a chance to mend their ways, if they don’t, they are gone. As both a buyer and seller on Bonanzle I find this very heartening. There are some large sites that allow bad sellers to remain even after the have been reported several times to management. Bonanzle acts quickly and decisively to protect its community.
The other thing that happened today was a big update. Bonanzle is very unusual in that it allows it’s community decide what the next improvements should be. That’s right, we get to vote on what we think is most important to address next. Bonanzle listens to its end users. Changes are based on what will benefit the community, not what will fill their coffers.
Today’s changes included new shipping options, sellers can now pre-set the order that their items appear in their booth, and my favorite, the search for items can now include “-” so you can exclude words for more refined searches! There were many other changes, and you can find them all on the changelist page. It has a running list of improvements that have been made to the site since before they even came out of beta.
Every week that goes by makes me glad that I found Bonanzle. As a buyer I am finding what I want at a good price in a safe environment and as a seller I have a site that is easy, inexpensive, profitable, has management that actually listens, and continual improvements to an already good thing.
Have You made your Goals for 2009?
Why do New Year Resolutions seem to fail so often? Maybe you are just making wishes and aren’t really setting a reachable goal. I don’t make New Years Resolutions, but I have been setting personal and business goals for myself for years now. There are many things I have learned about how to set goals that work
- They have to be realistic and attainable. I know very well I cant lose 20 pounds in a month. If I set that as my goal, I will fail. The idea of goals is not to set yourself up to fail!
- They have to be specific. “I want to make more money” is not a goal, it’s a wish.
- They have to be couched in positive terms. “I won’t procrastinate” isn’t a good goal. “I will start working on my taxes March 15 and will finish by April 1″ is attainable, specific and positive (well, ok, it’s positive if you are getting a refund).
- Consider all the steps involved. I had set up some preliminary goals a few years ago, then looked at all the things I had to do to get there. I realized that to reach those goals I was going to have to work 120 hours a week. Ooops!
- They have to be bite sized, but not too refined. If I want to add 200 new items to my online stores each month, I can’t say I will do 6 every day. I will say I will do 50 a week, mostly because of #6
- Allow for life to interfere, and reset your goals when needed. If my child gets sick, or company drops in, or the power goes out, I can’t be fretting about not making my goals that day. I have to address the things at hand, then pick up again as soon as I can.
- Set goals for all aspects of your life so you have balance.
- Goals cannot depend on other people. I set goals for how many new items I will add to my stores, but not how many dollars I will make. I can control what I do, I cannot predict or depend on what others will do.
- Write them down. I have a sign up in my office with my goals. If you have someone in your life that tend to shoot down ideas or is down on themselves, don’t share your goals with them. Your goals can be private. Write them down and keep them in your wallet instead of on your wall.
- Forgive yourself if you blow your goals. Reevaluate, set new goals and move on. Don’t beat yourself up.
- Celebrate your successes!
- Set new goals, so you continue to grow. Goal setting is a 12 months of the year activity, its not just for January 1st!
My 2009 Goals
Add a minimum of 200 new items a month to my Bonanzle stores.
January: Add baby and toddler clothes to my Lonely Hanger Bonanzle booth
February: Add designer purses and open A Night Owls Books Bonanzle Booth
March: Add existing china inventory to my Set a Pretty Table Booth in time for Easter shoppers.
April: Fill and open my Stitchers Stash Bonanzle booth
Go to Estate Sales twice a month to find new items to list in my Bonanzle A Night Owls Treasures booth, Happy Holidays and Set A Pretty Table booth
Spend 30 minutes each morning doing something to promote and improve my business. Use ideas in the Bonanzle Action Club forum.
Have all orders packed and ready to ship before 1:00 each day so I can eat a decent lunch.
Write a blog post at least once a week, and strive for more. By May 1 be writing 3 a week.
Lose 20 pounds before my 30 year reunion in September.
Make time 3 days a week to spend an hour or two in the garden.
Spend alone time with my teen daughter at least once a week to just hang out.
Some of these are a stretch for me. You can develop bad habits in a flash, but it takes time to develop good habits. The best thing to do is keep plugging away!
Set some goals and have a Happy New Year!
Multiple Email Addresses, It’s Easy to Do!
There are many reasons that you may need additional email addresses. Maybe for business, or because you only have one email address included in your internet package, or you need it for opening multiple store sites on sales venues like Bonanzle or eCrater.
There are several ways you can go, and many companies you can go with to get a FREE email address. My personal favorite is Gmail. It’s by Google and integrates right into an iGoogle home page if you have one. It gives you 7275 MB of space and doesn’t delete your emails or close your account if you don’t log in for a while like some other free sites do.
One advantage of using GMail is that their SPAM blocking is very effective.
Some people do object to the fact that Google will display ads on their web page when you’re viewing your email. Since Google will automatically scan your email, the ads will be targeted at you. However, if you forward your email to another account, you’ll never see these ads.
Gmail is a web-based email which means you can access it anywhere you have internet access and a web browser. You can check your Gmail anywhere you want, even on your phone!
I have many Gmail addresses, both business and personal. I certainly don’t want to check over a dozen email accounts manually several times a day, and I’ll bet you don’t either! It is really easy once you have a new Gmail account to set it up to forward to your regular email account whenever a new email comes in (go to Settings>Forwarding). If you want to be able to check your email on the road be sure to set it to “keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox”.
I have 9 Gmail addresses for all my accounts on Bonanzle. You are required to have a different email address for each User ID you register. I have 8 booth IDs and one buying ID. I have filters in my email program so that all incoming emails are filtered. I have several booths for different product areas, but all products are processed the same so I just have a “sold” folder that all notices go to, no matter which booth they originated in. I have another for incoming messages, and another for forum notifications (I do love the forums on Bonanzle – so many friendly people!). That’s it. I have 8 booth IDs but I have one folder in my email program that has all the sold notices – talk about easy!
Sometimes shipping early just isn’t enough
The oddest shipping experience I had involved a Daffy Duck tie a lady named Julia bought for her brother’s birthday.
As usual I packed it carefully in a box and printed up an official USPS label with the package id, upc code, etc.. The postman picked it up, and it was on it’s way from San Diego to Carmel California. It’s a 450 mile trip, within the same state. I sent the tracking number to Julia and fully expected to hear in a couple of days that the tie had arrived as expected. Guess again.
A week later I get an email from Julia. The tie has not arrived. I double checked the tracking, and there it was, sitting in Missouri! Now it’s been a long time since I sat in a geography class, but I had a hard time understanding that one…San Diego California to Carmel California, via Missouri.
Hmmmm.
I usually only have one of the items I sell. I specialize in collectibles, hard to find items and replacement china. It’s not as if I could say, oh, here, let me send you another one.
Fortunately Julia was very nice about the whole thing. We had several emails go back and forth and even chatted about our long ago days in Girl Scouts – that must have come up because it was the cookie time of year. I volunteer every year as the Service Unit coordinator and undoubtedly had cookies on the brain.
After a bit of prodding the package did finally get loose from Missouri and began to wend it’s way across the country. It arrived, safely, on March 9, a full 4 weeks after it had been mailed.
Julia’s brother loved his gift. She said “He’ll wear it while delivering his Powerpoint presentations. He says he’s deth-pic-able.”
If we had not been able to pry the package loose from that black hole in Missouri I would have of course refunded Julia every cent, but that would have been so unfortunate. Where else could she have found a tie like that that was no longer available in any store?
We do our best at A Night Owl’s Treasures to make sure your packages arrive safely and in a timely manner. We go through an astonishing amount of boxes, bubble wrap and packing peanuts. When you sell items that are no longer available in any store, anywhere, you have to be so careful when you pack and ship, because those items cannot be replaced. Professional packaging and labeling will get your items to you safely, and we sincerely hope, quickly
Finding Everything but the Ordinary
Where are you doing your online shopping? For many people one of the places they automatically go to is eBay. If you haven’t’ been there for a while you are going to notice something fairly quickly, eBay is not what it used to be.
Many buyers this year are finding that much of the old quirkiness and unique finds are missing. What happened? eBay has new management and they believe what people want is brand new, out of the box, thousands of the same item available buying experience. The problem is that in my experience people were shopping there for the unique and hard to find, not just the same old stuff you can pick up at any mall.
But why is that unique stuff hard to find on eBay these days? The smaller sellers like us have been priced out of the venue – the fees were just getting too high and we got tired of raising our prices to cover more and more fees.
Most of the sellers who left eBay are still selling, they are just scattered at several dozen other sites. I think I just heard some moans there…who wants to shop at dozens of sites to find one unique thing. Not me, that’s for sure! There is still an easy way to find your unique items, Google Product Search (also known as Google Shopping) http://www.google.com/products or Google Base http://www.google.com/base. Never heard of them? They are the greatest. They enable you to search all the best of the online stores. Stores submit information on their products to Google, often on a daily basis, so you can search thousands of stores at once. These searches will not pick up the inventory from all stores, because each store is responsible for giving Google their product information. If the store doesn’t submit a feed, they are not included. What is amazing is Google doesn’t even charge a fee for this service, to either the buyer or seller, which is perfect for smaller retailers like us.
Product Search is pretty straightforward, type in your search terms, and you get pages of what you want. Base is a little more sophisticated. There are dropdown boxes so you can narrow your search. They are both very useful.
What if you just want to browse, and don’t have a particular item in mind? We have our extensive inventory 
at a very nice new site, http://www.bonanzle.com. There are over 2000 other sellers of the unique that have opened up shop on the site, with more every day. The site is growing at the rate of over 1000 new users (buyer and new sellers) and 30,000 new items a week. Bonanzle’s motto is “Find Everything but the Ordinary”. You won’t find the Virgin Mary’s image burned into a piece of toast there, but there are plenty of other fun things to keep you happily browsing for a while.
Our booth is at http://www.bonanzle.com/booths/ANightOwl
Avoid the Holiday Lines!
The holiday season is upon us. For those of you with friends and family scattered around the country and world, that can only mean one thing, shipping.
Every year around this time shipping times slow from the sheer volume of packages. It used to be if you were just a little late you could bump up to the speedier service with not too much financial pain. Things are changing in shipping. Fuel costs are up, and shipping costs go up right along with them. UPS, USPS and FedEx are all going to raise rates again in early 2009. DHL is not going to ship within the United States anymore (they will continue to ship from the US to international addresses) so if you had used them for domestic shipping you are going to have to find another service.
What does this mean to you? It means you should plan ahead. The shipping companies are 
always trying to drill this into us, ship early, ship early, but based on the lines at post office year after year many are not heeding this advice.
There are a few things you can do to avoid this last minute hassle. After all, who wants to stand in line at the post office when you have cookie to bake, Christmas trees to trim, parties to go to, and children home on winter break?
Did you know that you can have either your postman or UPS come to your house to pick up your package? Its easy! If you have the packing supplies and an accurate scale you can go to http://www.ups.com or http://www.usps.com and schedule a pickup online. UPS charges a small fee, USPS offers the service for free if you are sending at least one Priority or Express package.
Another option is to send gift cards instead of gifts, be really careful about that this year though, as the economy tightens more brick and mortar stores will be closing up shop in the coming months. The first thing they do is stop accepting gift cards.
I have an even better idea – the most convenient method of all – shop online and have the store ship directly to the recipient. Many online stores offer gift wrapping services for a small fee. Small retailers like myself will wrap the items in pretty tissue paper and ribbon if we know it is a gift going direct, at no extra cost, and can pretty it up even more for a small fee. In the sometimes impersonal world of internet buying I know how important it can be to our customers that we give that little bit of extra customer service.
This winter everyone wants to save time, money and gas – buying your gifts online and having them shipped direct is the way to go!
