My Experiences

Sorry I have not been around much lately, but have been attending some personal matters; this by the way will be part of what I will briefly go over on this post. No matter what you do or fail to do, life continues. It doesn’t stop or slows down waiting for you to catch up; it just continues its path, with you or without you.

When you decide to run a business, whether it is large or small or whether you have 200 hundred employees or it is just you, you must plan for the unexpected. Call it “Plan B”, “A what if” or whatever you want to call it, but you must always be prepared just in case it starts to rain on your parade.

For a few weeks, my eBay business began to build momentum and everything seems to be looking up. Not that I was getting rich by any means, but was making progress and still have plenty of time to pursue other hobbies. By the way, you should not get so involved in your business that you begin to neglect everything else, because sooner or later you’ll pay the price; more on that later.

Anyway, just when I though everything was going as planned, my wife became gravely ill. Attending to her issue took much of our time; leaving little time to run my eBay business and attend other matters. However, we had a plan B and began to concentrate our efforts into the urgent an important things. Let me ask you a question; do you think that taking care of the urgent and important things is a good strategy? Well, I believe it is and I’m sure most of you will agree as well. However, do you know what is urgent and important to you? That’s one of the most important questions you should ask yourself before beginning any business endeavor.

Taking care of wife was urgent an important and so was taking care of my business, but what about my health? Was my health important? Probably now more than ever; if I got sick who was going to take care of my wife or the business? For the first time, I began to realize something I’ve learned a long time ago, “one must know what’s urgent and important”.

In the book, The 7-Habits of Highly Effective People, the author talks about urgent and important, and the not so urgent or unimportant. You may want to read the book to understand it, but basically we spent much of our time doing urgent but unimportant things. Here’s an example: Is exercise and nutrition important? The answer is obvious, of course they are. But are these things pressing on you at the moment? They are not, which is why they are so easy to neglect. But what if the doctor told you that if you didn’t watch your diet you’d die within a year? I’ll let you answer that to yourself.

What’s urgent for most of us, including top executives and professionals? Phone calls, emails, etc.; Are these things important? Probably. Are they urgent? Probably not. That phone call might be important, but probably not urgent; besides, we could easily use a recorder.

At any rate, for three weeks my wife and I concentrated our efforts in doing the urgent and important things, and we both succeeded. I sold over $500.00 in merchandise, again not riches by any means, but an excellent start for a beginner. My wife begun to feel better and I managed to stay healthy. We did what was necessary to manage and overcome the obstacles in front of us, without going into a panic mode; but it takes planning.

One more thing, make sure you stop to smell the roses or “sharpen your saw”. That’s another excellent lesson from The 7-Habits by Highly Effective People. You can just work and work without taken care of yourself or everything else. Suppose you use a computer for your business, which is what you’ll be using if trying an eBay business. Now suppose you use your computer day-in and day-out without deleting unnecessary files, removing accumulated dust, keeping your anti-virus or other software up-to-date, and so forth. Sooner or later your computer begins to fail, until it completely breaks down and crashes. What’s next? Panic mode, frustration, irritation, and probably a few angry costumers.

Believe it or not, that’s how many people run their business. They are so concentrated in production that they fail to take care of the machinery that is part of that production. If you want to know more about these topics, visit The Seven Habits.

I know I was a little bit off the subject on this post, but the circumstances called for a little change in content. I promise to get back to posting about running an eBay business on my next post. Take care. Happy computing to all!!

Making my First Sale

Well, I finally made my first sale and felt like a child inside a candy store; it was a great feeling and a milestone for my new endeavor. My auction was set to end within seven days of the listed date; though, for a small fee, I could have chosen a 10-day list option.

Within those seven days, I spent countless time browsing my eBay listing to see if anyone had placed a bid. On the third day, I finally received an offer from a prospective buyer; though not much higher than my starting bid price, but an offer nonetheless. By the sixth day though, my hopes of obtaining any other bids were slowly fading. There were a few watchers, but so far, no more takers.

In the meantime, I continued checking my listing everyday, though with less frequency. Also, by now I began to doubt in my ability to sell anything, on eBay or anywhere else. However, on the seventh day, something happened that raised my hopes and beliefs to new levels; the bid on one of the items went from $4.30 (my starting bid price), to over $10.00 and by the end of the bidding time, the bid had gone up to $19.53. By the way, that was the final bid offer, which helped me realize that good things do come to those who wait.

Soon after the final bid, I received an email from eBay congratulating me on my sale; it also included a link to send an acceptance email message to the buyer. Then, about an hour later, I received another email, this time from PayPal, indicating that an instant payment had been received from the buyer. The email also provided a link to my PayPal account so I could view the invoice and print a shipping label.

Printing the shipping label was a snap, as PayPal provides very easy to follow instructions. I printed a copy of the invoice and placed it inside a mailing envelop along with the item I had just sold. I didn’t have blank shipping labels, like the ones you can get from Avery, so I printed the shipping label on a blank sheet of paper and taped it to the outside of the package. Then I drove to the gas station just a few blocks from my house and dropped off the package at the US Post Office express mailing service.

As soon as I returned home, I sent the buyer an email indicating that the item had been shipped and I included a tracking number, which was sent to me by PayPal. The buyer replied back to thank me, which made me feel pleased that, at least for now, I had a satisfied costumer.

I had auctioned seven more items within this time period. Not all the items sold, at least not on the first try, and not all buyers were as generous with their bid offers. But I had succeeded and had gained a lot from these experiences. I will tell you more about those experiences when we meet again. Until then, happy computing to all!!