Selling On eBay (Internet Business)

If you're trying to make money quickly online, selling on eBay is one of the easiest, straight forwards and direct ways to get started.

After all, eBay sells over $60 billion worth of products every year and serves over a million people buying and selling every day, so it's almost like having a direct route to automatic traffic and sales.

Getting started selling on eBay is easy because they actually give you the platform for selling your products, there's no guess work for how to create a site or figuring out how to set up a shopping cart, eBay does it all for you.

Getting set up is even simpler with their easy to follow tutorials. Simply create an account and follow the instructions and you're on your way to selling and earning online.

Free trial

prostores

Selling on eBay Starts with Profitable Products

If you're trying to figure out what to sell on eBay you can certainly sell stuff you have laying around the house, or you can try your hand at buying products from a reliable eBay wholesale dropshipping supplier. 

 If you're really stumped on what to sell, have a look at eBay's "What's Hot List".  This is a list of the hottest selling items on eBay which also clues you in on just how well the items sell, very helpful info.

 

Effective Selling on eBay

Because eBay is such a popular and trusted platform you have a big sales advantage.  Additionally eBay goes to great lengths to get you set up with a store and help you make the most sales you possibly can but as with any store, online or off, using effective selling and promotion strategies and techniques will be to your advantage. 

 Here are a few things that will help you.

• Use Relevant product descriptions. Use relevant and descriptive search terms in your listing's title.  

For example, if you are selling wooden walking sticks, a listing titled 'walking sticks' will draw fewer targeted buyers than a title that says 'historic wooden walking sticks' or perhaps 'carved wooden walking sticks'.

Being as specific as possible will help you better appeal to the shoppers that are most likely to make a purchase.

• Try adding a video to your eBay auctions. You've heard the phrase, a picture is worth a thousand words.  Try using video in your eBay auctions as well.  There's no extra cost to use video in eBay and it's easy to do. 

Keep it simple. Don't make things complicated if you don't have to, a simple video will do.

Demonstrate your product and describe what makes it unique. Let your viewer get a good look at how it is made and what condition it is in.

Include the features but also include the benefits you product can bring to a customer. In other words, how will your product make someone's life better or the task at hand easier.

  

Shipping Considerations When Selling on eBay

Good shipping practices drive customer satisfaction. It improves your ratings and helps ensure buyers come back.

That means always over-deliver on shipping promises.

For example let's say you promise a buyer they will receive their items in 5-7 days.  You can over-deliver on their expectations by getting their item to them in 3 days.

That always makes an impression on a buyer. They get their items sooner than they anticipated and you just became a hero.

Additionally always know how you will be shipping your items before you even list them. You will avoid the end-of-auction scramble and you'll be much better prepared to get the items out the door faster.

See the eBay dropshipping survival tips

Accepting Customer Payment

Avoid payment headaches and use PayPal when selling on eBay.  It's actually the one payment system that's most used and trusted on eBay.

Beware of various money orders that people sometimes use. There are U.S. money orders that can only be cashed at a U.S. Post office, not a big deal but if you're not expecting that, it could be a hassle to deal with. 

I'd suggest avoid accepting money orders altogether and simply stick with PayPal, it's safer and it's easy.

Selling on eBay is one of the easiest and most trusted ecommerce business ventures on the web. As you can see it's easy to get started, easy to maintain and because eBay is a trusted online platform, it has built in traffic and awesome sales potential.   

How To Get Set Up on eBay

I personally like eBay ProStores. They are an eBay Company designed for small sized businesses making it easy to sell products and services online through a fully customized Web store.
Selling on eBay is super easy with their step-by-step wizards that will help you design the look of your store, upload products, and set up shipping and sales tax information. eBay Pro stores also includes the following which takes the guess work and technical stress off of you.

• Domain registration and hosting
• Shopping cart
• Secure, SSL-encrypted credit card processing
• Integration with eBay and PayPal
• Marketing and Merchandising Tools
• Product catalog

Thx:. www.homenotion.com

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How To Become A Freelancer Business

How to become a freelancer to start earning from home. Working as a freelancer is one of the best home business options. Without starting an actual business you can be independent through freelancing. If you do your freelancing service under your own name you need not register your service as a business. With minimum expense and without any time consuming process you can start as a freelancer.

You freelancing service can be focused on any niche. In general a freelancer is one who provides service for a fee. The more attractive point is you can work independently and there won't be any long term or permanent relationship between you and an employer. According to the nature of the service and the time required you can do freelancing service to one or more employer.


Why freelance is a best option?

The recession and the economic downtrend have cost many their job. Almost the whole world is affected and no country is an exception whether it is a developed country or a developing country. The sudden job loss has affected millions of families and pushed them into financial troubles. To generate an immediate income you can become a freelancer. You need not stop your job search, but while searching for a job you can decide to do freelance and try finding work independently. You can be your own boss.

The freelance options

Web designer

Graphic designer

Freelance writer

Desktop publishing services

Virtual professional

Freelance bookkeeper

The above mentioned works are most common options and it is not the end of the list. You can do any service or job that fits into the freelance work according to the need of the niche you want to serve.

The requirements of freelance

The first basic requirement to start your freelance service is to have something valuable to offer to the customers of your niche. You might have a professional skill or some developed skill due to your experience. Convert your skill and talent into a freelance service and offer to the potential clients or an employer. For example you can design websites and graphics as a free lancer. The basic infrastructure you need to develop a good income stream through freelancing.

Your own website to announce to the world your presence in a particular field

A business phone line

Business card

A post box number

A list of your work

If possible some references. If not you can get them after satisfying some clients by your work. It will make easy to get more clients.

How to get freelance work?

Access reputed sources to get freelance work as there are a number of dubious elements over the net. Getting freelance work through trusted sources can guarantee you the reward you are deserved to get for your work. There are some freelance job sources like

craiglist.org
guru.com
elance.com
rentacoder.com

Search the freelance job websites according to the freelance work you are talented to do. Some websites offer free membership and some freelance job sites charge renewable fee to bid for jobs. You can find some sites with both free and paid membership. But under free membership you can find only a limited job opportunities.

Free advertising sites offer good exposure to your freelance work freely. You can also host your profile on freelance job sites and social networking sites.

Advantages and disadvantages of freelancer

First advantages:

- You can work from home
- Do at your own flexible hours
- Low startup cost and simple to start
- Creates additional source of income
- Even more useful in a job loss situation

Disadvantages

- Tough competition
- Employers psychology that freelancer means less to pay
- The global reach the employer has to get freelance workers

But staying in the field for some time and after getting some valuable experience you can command a good fees for you freelance work. The valuable references you can get will add to the power of commanding a good rate for your work.

As a freelancer you have to follow the tax rules of your state or country as any other salaried person or business entity. Carefully assess the employer as there are a lot of narrow minded employers who are looking at freelancers as cheap source to extract work and pay ridiculous fees and that too not paying on time. Only through experience and more exposure to the freelance job market you will be able to identify the genuine employers who really value your service and pay accordingly. Choose the right field that fits into your passion and skill to become a freelancer.

www.internethomebusinessopportunities.net

Opportunities Business Opportunities

Seeking the right business opportunity.



A Google search for the term 'business opportunities' returned over 750 MILLION results - which one suits you?



Looking for a genuine business opportunity that will suit your skills, fit your budget and give a realistic chance of earning a living (let alone make you rich) is a mammoth task and one that you should be taken slowly and carefully.



Top Ten Tips.



1) Take professional advice

2) Pick an industry that is 'on the up'.

3) Ignore any opportunity that asks for money 'to tell you more'.

4) Pick a business that suits your skills or a subject that you love.

5) Research thoroughly BEFORE parting with any cash.

6) Question who is really going to make the money - you or the person selling you the 'opportunity'.

7) Don't borrow more than you can afford to lose.

8) If you are buying an existing business - ask an accountantto analyse the accounts - don't rely on your own intuition to save money (unlsess you are an accountant!).

9) Don't believe everything you are told - it may be true but is always worth double checking!

10) Anything that sounds 'too good to be true' will be!



Buy a business?



Buying an existing business is a good way to leapfrog much of the set up process. Although the cost of purchase may be higher than if you started from scratch, you do gain a trading concern from day one and should be able get a realistic idea of the potential turnover/profits from the audited accounts.



Top tip - if you like the idea of buying a business, Daltons Weekly and Exchange & Mart have a vast selection of opportunities advertised every week. Over 30,000 business are also offered for sale at: www.businessesforsale.com



Buy a franchise?



Franchising is the granting of a license by one person (the franchisor) to another (the franchisee), which entitles the franchisee to trade under the trade mark/trade name of the franchisor. The franchisor will receive an initial fee from the franchisee, payable at the outset, together with on-going management service fees - usually based on a percentage of annual turnover. In return, the franchisor has an obligation to support the franchise network, notably with training, product development, advertising, promotional activities and with a specialist range of management services. For more information see our Franchise section.



Business Opportunities Articles



Opportunities How to find the best home business opportunities
Since companies have started downsizing their workforce, more and more people are looking for ways to work and earn from home and start their own home based business.

Opportunities Business Opportunities
A Google search for the term 'business opportunities' returned over 750 MILLION results - which one suits you?

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Tips good online business

Online trading can benefit both businesses and consumers. However, the online trading world can be a scary place for some consumers.

The Best Practice Model, a best practice guide for business, has set out practices for businesses to encourage consumer confidence in eCommerce (see the eCommerce website of the Department of the Treasury).

Using the principles in the Best Practice Model the following information is a general guide for businesses when developing an online presence.

The trader’s full contact details including a street address will give consumers more confidence. Some may even choose to make contact before making a purchase 'just to be sure'.
If trust marks or seals are used they should be easy to verify and relevant.
Secure online payments or the provision of an offline alternative are vital. Few consumers are prepared to trust their money to an unsecured site.
Terms and conditions should be clearly written and displayed, easily accessible and comply with all local and federal laws.
Warranty and refund policies are important to consumers. These should also be clearly written and displayed, easily accessible and comply with all local and federal laws.
Products/services should comply with all Australian standards such as product safety standards.
Advertising and any representations made about the product/service should be accurate with no hidden fine print. Consumers do not like surprises where their bank balance is concerned.
If prices are displayed, accuracy is the key. For instance consumers should be made aware of which currency is being used.
A reliable complaints handling procedure will also encourage consumer confidence in a business. No one wants things to go wrong but if a speedy, helpful service is in place the customer’s experience will ultimately be a positive one.
Special care should be taken when dealing with minors. Businesses should be aware they are dealing with a minor and when appropriate get consent from the child’s parent or guardian.
Online businesses may need to make adjustments in the provision of goods/services to ensure that they are accessible to people with a disability.

Good online business practices will encourage consumer confidence and this will generate more sales.
For more information

For more information on eCommerce and the Best Practice Model visit the eCommerce site of the Department of the Treasury and the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) now called the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO).
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10 Ways to Improve Your Business Operations

Every new day gives you a chance to move forward from your present situation. You can improve your business on a number of fronts: by increasing profits, reducing losses, getting more customers, expanding the markets, becoming more visible in the community, going public or a number of other items deemed desirable.




1. Start the year in high gear. Take a notebook (or a laptop or PDA) and jot down your thoughts and plans for the year. It's the time to get excited to the prospects of this New Year! List down ideas on new product lines, or new projects that you want to take on. Write down your ideas on how to expand and energize your business. Only through innovation and continuing adoption of relevant new products and ideas can your business improve its competitiveness and profitability. Start the ball rolling with financers, lenders and bankers if you need to take on additional capital.

2. Dust off your business plans. Review, review and review your business plan. See how far (or little) your business has taken shape from your original idea. Many entrepreneurs write a business plan at the start, only to forget about it. Some stray away from their plans - and fail. Go find your business plans and update it. Since your business' inception, a number of factors must have changed - from the overall business climate to your product line. Take all those changes into consideration, factor in your and your family's goals, and get a clear assessment of the direction of your business. Get in touch with your business advisers, if any.

3. Rekindle your relationship with your customers. The start of the year is the perfect time to tap your customer database and get in touch with your existing customers. Whether by phone, email or letter, contact your customers to greet them "Happy New Year!" and remind them that your business is ready to serve them this year. You need to constantly look for ways to encourage repeat business. Although marketing and advertising are important to get more customers, quality, service and customer satisfaction are what keep a business successful in the long run.

4. Evaluate your pricing. Think about raising your rates. Now is the appropriate time to inform clients that your rates are going up. Just be sure to check out what the competition's doing and make sure your prices or rates aren't too low. You don't want to overprice yourself out of the market, yet you should not bear the burden of a cash flow shortage. Give your customers a month or two advance notice should you decide to increase your rates.

5. Find ways to cut your costs. Even if you have secured funding from investors, you need to constantly look for ways to reduce your costs. From making double-sided paper copies to ordering shipping supplies in bulk, you can reduce wasted material, effort, and time in making, selling, and delivering your product. The result is an improvement in your company's bottom line and an increased competitive advantage.

6. Resolve to improve your weak spots. Take stock of all aspects of your business operation and list down the areas that you want to improve. If your list of delinquent receivables is longer than Santa's list, find out how you can improve your billing and collection process. Perhaps you need to improve your record keeping to help flag you on delinquent accounts.

7. Institute measures to assess the performance of your business. Setting clear standards for your business allows you to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of your strategies. If you haven't done so in the past year, start determining how much you are making per hour of work, how effective your advertising is, and some other measurements of where your business has been. Set some benchmarks and periodically assess how your business is doing. You need to know what you consider an improvement before you can start to improve on it.

8. Keep employees involved. Good employees are hard to find; yet they are an important element in your business. Check to see if they are getting what they need and make them part of the team. Help them understand the importance of their role in your business and how their job impacts the business as a whole. Review your relationship with your employees and find ways to keep your relationship happy and avoid costly attrition.

9. Explore new markets or improve marketing. Start the year by exploring new markets for your business. Whether you are looking at targeting a new demographic or getting your business up on the web, take time to plan how you can expand your existing market. Look for ways to improve your marketing, whether by winning easy publicity, arranging an open house or preparing direct mails.

10. Find out how you can live a more balanced life. Work and business are not the be-all and end-all of your life. Learn to have fun! Spend more time with your family. Take a vacation once in a while. Engage in activities that will rejuvenate your spirit and your life. Take care of yourself, and your health. Your productivity and focus will improve if you are stress-free and healthy.
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How Your Business Can Capitalize on Location-Based Marketing

As society evolves into an increasingly mobile interface, businesses must follow suit or get left behind. It seems there’s a new location-based app being incorporated into mobile devices each and every day, and with good reasons. How else are we to keep abreast of the whereabouts of friends and family in the new portable world? But with these geo-social networking sites comes an opportunity for business owners, particularly retail stores and restaurants, to capitalize on real-time data being provided by subscribers.

Location-based sites in a nutshell

Users connect with friends and family by “checking-in” at a particular location. Points are awarded for checking in at particular venues and users can post their check-ins on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Users earn badges and mayorships based upon the number of times they check-in at a business or location. These sites are intelligent in that they take the user’s location and notify users of events and other activities taking place nearby at that moment or by the hour.

How businesses can capitalize

The geosocial-networking phenomenon offers businesses the opportunity to drive business to their location by first listening to, and then engaging users of these location-based social sites. Create content on these sites. Establish your digital-self on Foursquare, Loopt, Brightlite, and Gowalla. Tweet, Yelp, create a Facebook profile…, whatever you can do to link your physical business location to the mobile, virtual world. Mostly, be heard.

These geo-sites offer real-time customer demographics to businesses—yes, real-time. The value of real-time customer information cannot be overstated. By monitoring a site like Foursquare, businesses can get a potential customer’s exact location at that moment in relation to their own business, whether that customer is male or female, and what hours an establishments seem to be the most popular.

What’s even better is that you can target customers of a competitor in your area with specials for customers that check-in to your competitor’s location, in hopes of drawing them over to your business. “Two-for-one dinner offer at Joe’s Pesto Palace just for presenting this screen. Offer good for next twenty minutes.” With that offer they get your address and you can extend the offer to their friends who might be nearby. A 2008 report by technology research firm ABI Research estimated geosocial-networking sites will generate as much as $3.3 billion in revenue by 2013.

Of course, with the advent of location-based networking sites comes the formation of marketing firms dedicated to capitalizing on them. If you’re a business owner and want to hire a firm to handle this aspect of your marketing campaign, you might check out Moment Feed, Three Ships Media, or any other firm specializing in location-based marketing.

So step aboard this virtual ship before it leaves your business behind. Location-based sites offer great opportunities for increased revenue in 2011 and the years to come.
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5 problems in IT business

Lindsay is an IBM distinguished engineer, having held positions at the software giant for over 20 years. He's worked variously as product manager for VisualAge Generator, co-leader of the Eclipse platform development team and director of WebSphere studio and Rational modelling tools departments. He is also a developer and researcher, contributing 14 patents to IBM's portfolio. He told Builder AU that when it comes to managing responsiveness in IT, there are five key factors you need to examine.

1. Asset Management

The problem is in knowing everything that a business owns, in terms of software resources. Code sitting on a mainframe is not like products sitting in a warehouse. According to Lindsay, many businesses claim to have trouble keeping track of all of their software once it's deployed.

"Most businesses suffer from a lack of inventory of existing code. You've got millions of lines of COBOL code and you don't know anything about it. The same problem is occurring now with Java code, everyone's got legacy Java code that they don't know what to do with," Lindsay said.

2. Architecture

If you don't design your software with the goal of being maintainable and reusable then it cannot be any surprise when it becomes difficult to maintain and reuse it, he said. The solution is in designing your systems and interfaces with an eye to the future. "You don't have the flexibility of repurposing code if it's very brittle, or it's poorly architected, with ill defined or even not defined interfaces and the like," he said.

3. Skills Modernization

Lindsay says that IBM has worked with thousands of COBOL developers to help them develop for more modern platforms, such as J2EE with Java. The dream for Rational and IBM is to remove the barriers of platform and middleware as to where developers can work.

"We want to move to a position where if you have 500 developers, instead of having 200 COBOL, 100 PL/1 and 200 Java, you end up with 500 general purpose business developers that can be applied to projects independent of deployment platform," he said. "You need to focus on better design and architecture of your systems, but at the end of the day people are the ones who are doing that, you need to focus on your staff."

The solution, according to Lindsay, is in retraining developers to higher level languages, which are agnostic to the issues of architecture. IBM Rational's answer to this is the Enterprise Generation Language, which can be compiled to run on CICS in COBOL, J2EE in Java, or as a native Linux, Windows or Solaris application. It also targets IBM platforms such as Websphere and Weblogic.

This is not a new phenomenon. IBM themselves have been working at the problem for two decades, and other languages also support multiple platform targets. Other languages also support this pattern: high level language Python can deploy on .NET with IronPython, or Java with Jython. In fact, this one language, many platforms approach is the other side of the coin to the many languages, one platform approach favoured by .NET.

The approach best for the business depends on what is easier to retrain: language syntax and semantics or the specifics of your middleware platform. IBM Rational is well and truly a proponent of the first. "There are a lot of people who have tried to retrain COBOL developers to Java. The failure rate is huge, it's in general not a winning proposition to try to do it. EGL is a higher level language and so you have less to know about. Learning the Java syntax would be rather straight forward for a COBOL developer, that's not the issue. The issue is learning about the concepts of OO, learning about the various J2EE extensions. I'm not telling you it's impossible, I'm just telling you what customers have told me: that they've tried it and in general it's not a path that most of them choose to go down again."

4. Team Infrastructure

Too long has a divide existed between mainframe and distributed infrastructure, Lindsay says. "I'm sure if you talk to many enterprise customers a lot of them have duplicate infrastructures. They have something for the mainframe or the enterprise system, and something totally different and disconnected for the distributed side. This came about because of the digital pilot projects they did in the early client/server days, it grew up and grew even more with Web investments."

The problem this causes is that it creates barriers that prevent a business from efficiently using their personnel and tools, he said. "You have this duplicate infrastructure and this limits your ability to move people around, because they're using totally different sets of tools, totally different processes. Of course it's more costly, our assertion here is that you need to move back to a consolidated team environment. You need to take advantage of all the tools that have come about in the distributed areas and apply them to mainframe development as well."

5. Budgetary Inflexibility

Lastly, it all comes down to money. Lindsay explains that "This is really simply the phenomenon that 70 to 80 percent of most companies IT budget is spent on maintenance, and you need to figure out ways to freeing up some of that money, so you have more than 20 to 25 percent to spend on the backlog. This is something to help mitigate the fact that there isn't this vast number of people you can bring into IT, at least get a better use out of the ones that you have."

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