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Sounds like you have already done all the work for her. you have everything you need except attaching the photos. Seems like redundant work. by the time you type everything for her, you might as well have typed it into a template you have created and saved.
But no offense, and just my opinion of quickly thinking about what you said.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
BTW Julie: here is her web site… http://suzanneawells.com/
check it out
We have a close family friend that my wife used to work with who lives only 1/2 mile or less [two minutes], that lists for us on Fri. Sat and some sundays for 3 to 4 hours per day 10 to 12 hours per week. we do $10 per hour with her and she does about 6 to 8 or more +/- per hour, so it equals out to be about $1.50 per item. OK for our $30-$35 items and up.
She will be starting to help us with my art portfolios of prints next week. She already has done some foreign stamps for us and will also start on a whole lot of US Mint Stamps after the art prints.
Yeah I agree. If I remeber one of her blog post videos after she had been working with him for a while she started sounding very down about the whole things and was polite but said she wasn’t going to be able to fulfill his needs without coming right out and saying he was a big bunch of trouble, but I heard that was the case later on.
Suzzanne is here in Atlanta and it wouldn’t be that far of a ride south for you to maybe make an appointment with her and go see her. Worthpoint went public not too long ago so guess his company is doing OK but I too would love to get into some of his warehouses. I also saw a few photos Suzanne posted and it all seemed like a big mess of boxes just piled eveywhere. I think you hit on it when you said “hoarder”. Bet you he still has everything he had when Suzanne last tried to help him out.
There is an interesting thread that may even still be in Suzzanne Wells own blog about where she contracted to list all of the items for the owner and founder of Worthpoint.com. Turns out he is or was a big buyer and also had numerous [and probably still has] warehouses here in Atlanta full of his purchases / items from cars and boats down to small jewelry. His corporate headquarters is here in Atlanta and used to be on Piedmont Rd.
In any case Suzanne and her crew worked a contract with him to list his stuff on line. But she had to back out of the deal for several reasons which she explains over several episodes of her thread. Very interesting story about her crew, there time, how she hires others [sub-contracts] work out to them to do the work and the speed and accuracy they deliver. I think I recall she was going to take years to complete his listings and the amount of money that would have been spent was large also. I also think I recall the Worthpoint owner being problematic to work with.
Very interesting story to research and read about. I came across it while looking for our first assistant a few years back. Guess you can Google Suzzane H. Wells and Worthpoint together and come up with a link somehow.
No problem Mark. :
Short on time today but will try to answer / shed light on your questions:
What do you expect to do with Shopify? >> First to have a complete total back up of our Ebay store as it sits with item specifics, descriptions, prices along with photos as a secure back-up to the Ebay and Etsy stores. Also to have a store of our own, which we run, our way without any Ebay rules. Sell to, ship to, and ship how we wnat. In other words total control of our store and also once sales build, to be able to listless on other platforms so we save on selling fees and the like.
How are you going to market it? We are building a 4th site that will be more of an informational site about all of the art, prints, paintings, editions, antiques, fakes, reproductions, how made, etc., etc. that we will use as what is called a “funnel through” site. Anyone visiting that site using any of the thousands of key words on those several hundred pages will see tons of links back to our Shopify store for “buying opportunities”. This is a technique that has been used for some time by more successful online sellers. Also we will be montizing internally within that info. site.
I was under the impression that Shopify would not work well for the type of items most of us are doing on ebay. Well that could be true depending on what you sell. We have built up items more about home decor, Asian decor, art glass, colletor art prints and abstract original prints and paintings. Much of this is not actually on Ebay or Etsy. We have been saving for our own store but some are going into the Ebay-Etsy stores shortly.
What is your take on this and should I be going to Shopify? >>> If you don’t have a background in SEO, using Google Tools [several for keyword research, ad campaigns, etc.] then a Shopify Store will just sit there and not much traffic will come your way. That is why we are going to use a funnel through site and a ton of SEO tools we have been studying over the past 5 years to drive traffic along with an email mailing list of thousands of customers who have bought from us through the years. we will be direct marketing to them.
What would be the best type of items to cross list on Shopify? >> We are going to mostly place high end over $75 and up to $350 art work, paintings, glass sculture, known names of home decor and such. As I said earlier if all you do is copy items to Shopify they will just sit. You have to have a feel for online marketing, traffic building, strong SEO skills. We have been studying and building a web site of our own that is hosted by us and that will be going live by end of year. That site has a ton of online utilities that is included in the tool kit we have at our disposal.
Many of the artists we have followed for years got there start on Ebay or Etsy but as there customer, collector base grew they gravitated away from Ebay and Etsy 100% and support themselves and sell there art through their own sites. That is sort of a long term goal for us. But we may always keep the Etsy / Ebay store as a back up also.
We have a complete art making, sculpture creation, wood working shop in our basement and now that we are retired, we are going to be making more of our own art work, home decor mirrors, clocks, table sculpture as mini mfg. and be buying less, and less of mass. mfg. items from the wild. Unless higher end items.
Just any insights that you have on Shopify. >>> Shopify is not a market selling platform like Ebay and Etsy. It will just sit there. It is a shell. Shopify is just like Wix, Volusion, Magento and others. It is a store hosting site and we can have our own domain name, our own domain email addresses, and direct communications with customers directly.
Also about these venues, if “you build it, they WILL NOT come!”. You will have to build the traffic. Very unlike Ebay and Etsy that has already done the work to drive traffic, but it drives it to their categories, not neccassarily “your” site. So if you want Murano Italian Art Glass Sculpture, the searcher will see everyone that has a Murano piece. On hopify, if they clcick on a Google feed they will only come to our site. So going to Shopify is very much like opening up your own Brick and Mortar Store only online. You have to do the marketing and have a marketing plan all on your own. That is what our informational site and the tools that come with it that we subscribe to provide. This is more of what we have been concentrating on than building a mega store on Ebay.
But as Jay says, we always have to feed the beast, but in the Shopify case, the beast we will be feeding will be our own beast, of our own creation. But as a contemporary artist and print maker, I am more interested now that I am retired or creating my own art, and home decor items and feeding the online venues with my “self made inventory”.
I think it was Christine that mention here on SL one time, that if I ever got a site of my own she would be interested in following it because of all the details I usually post about art work, how to distinquish real prints from repro prints, color, art paper, etc. We have over 40 years of expertise in the fine art area and art related home decor niche, and that is what got us thinking a lot more about doing our own web site and blog in a more “niched market”, not a general store, used, vintage items like our current Ebay store.
Guess it is going to be an interesting journey for a 69 year old, retired artist. A journey of more of personal interest and creative expression as we begin to go toward that horizon in the sky. We don’t have many years left to pursue our passion and to try to make money within it to boot.Our company slogan is Live to Create and Celebrate and that is what we are going to try to do over our final years here.
Hope this helps fill in some of your questions about Shopify and similiar sites.
Kindest Regards,
MDC Concepts, Inc.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in AtlantaSure thing. have some updates.
My last feedback from the engineering team was Spring release for Shopify and Fall for Etsy.Well Shopify is about done. I got an app update about 3 weeks ago for testing. I started using and found some bugs. After a bunch of screen shots and about a week of communication and re-coding all of what I was seeing is now corrected. As of Monday of this week I can now highlight one line in WonderLister, right click for a drop down menu, click on send to Shopify and BINGO! everything moves to our Shopify Store dashboard as a draft. All Item specifics, all photos [has some real issues there-but all re-coded], the full desciption, condition, prices. Also WL now has a vendor and tags section and those get transferred also. Everything for a complete listing except for one or two fields specific to Shopify.
In order to test further for the WL team, I moved all 924 [st that time] listings over to Shopify and they all went just fine. Then deleted them and did them a second time. So, as of now, it is looking good. The support and engineering team are working internally on WL now, creating the Folders that will be needed to hold the “Listed on Shopify” items.
At this point I can go live with our Shopify store as far as WonderLister is concerned but I need to do some more design and organizational work myself inside of our Shopify dashboard. I can create my own WL folders for now manually. So maybe a few weeks +/- before a new update relaese that will go public, hopefully.etsy is coming along also, even though it is further behind than the Shopify module. In my version I am using, I see several commands that are showing functions for Etsy. There is a send to Etsy command button and a system folder that says “Send to Etsy” but as of yesterday, nothing is sent to Etsy. I have not been asked to do any Etsy testing yet so I would speculate still a few months out along with the fact that the Shopify module needs to get finished up first.
After I get our Shopify store online I will let you guys know and then you can cross reference our Ebay store to Shopify and see how things look. Would appreciate any comments on how things might be improved as far as the WL to Shopify transfer goes. Would be interested in feedback so I can pass along to the engineering team and help improve things for WonderLister.
WL as moving complete Ebay listings over to Shopify about every 10-15 seconds or so. So for 1,000 listings it would take about 2-1/2 hours or so. Also I could do them in smaller scheduled batches. Wonderlisters bulk editor is functional for changes on the listings within WL just as a normal function that we already have. It will just have to be submitted to Ebay as well as Shopify manually for now, but automatic submission to both channels is hopefully coming very shortly. I was asking for that just last week and they said it is coming.
Hope this info. helps somewhat.
mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Hey Mark.. Well if you lsiten to all of the Q&A things in that pod-cast, they cover most of this. And as i personally feel and said, I want total control of all of my items because we cross list. I have a lot of our items on Etsy, some on local channels and soon all of our inventory will be in our own store so I surely do not want our inventory to be any place other than at my finger tips [our storage facilties] so we can ship to anyone who buys from us on any platform.
And as you know, WonderLister is our main listing and command central dashboard. Their Shopify module is now going live and Etsy will soon follow. We will be able to sell on multi channel platforms, get all our financials in one spot and have our own centralized shipping point. So an Ebay program like they are exploring would have no interest to us. But sure makes me wonder what the underlying thought process is for ebay. To help provide a Seller service or do like Amazon and use it to clean house by implementing all the things you mention.
I found it Jay. It is RockStarFlipper.com Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb2irbf4LBE
He shows a screen shot from Ebay sent out polling the issue of Ebay doing a fulfillment program. he is not saying it “is” going to be done, just that Ebay is poking around the edges for interest on a program like this. Of course he goes on the offer just his personal opinion on a program such as this as well as the scrolling screen on the right shows his audience responses to this. He goes on to compare a hypothetical Ebay type program to the Amazon model.
I was just asking if anybody else [SL member] had seen or heard anything about this anywhere else.
Note that at the 11:01 mark he starts the conversation and at 11:54 is where he shows a screen shot of the Ebay email sent out asking about a program of this sorts. The rest are just coversations and answering viewer questions, which again is just his personal opinion.
He brought up a comment on cross listing, which we do, and that would be problematic with Ebay holding our inventory and doing the shipping. We like to have complete control of our inventory and a program like this would take that control away. especially since we are real close now to opening our own Online Store which is where we will be selling directly to traffic coming directly from Google searches.
So just wondering what SL members might think about a topic such as this.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
No Sharyn:. It was not about the Valet program. I have known about that effort for years. That is an old program of having drop of points like UPS stores where you take your items and they do the photography, create the listing and post and sell it for you for a large commission.
BTW that program though is getting some new juice with FedEx. FedEx and Ebay are talking about FedEx doing this for random sellers again.What I was hearing was a pod-caster talking about Ebay creating it’s own fulfillment program. This is a current discussion because he was talking about the Ebay Open Convention being moved to the Mandalay Hotel and the agenda and that is this Summer 2018. I was just asking if anybody else has heard about this.
But as Jay says above, who was it. So I will dig back through my pod casts lsitens this morning and get the link. I think I know who it was but have to find the link.
Mark is a good guy. Communicated with him after the first interview and also downloaded his book back before it was openingly available.
Good stuff, as he and Jay said for the beginner or newbie who is getting started or a serious part timer. Covers all the basic questions that do come up in the very beginning.
In my case I already knew most of what we talked about and his book covered. Some of my questions were more deeply involved being a Sub-S corporation and he referred me to an acquaitance of his that he thought would be better suited for the more complicated issues.
But in my case, my current CPA understands the buying and re-selling of used unique, items because his sisters used to have antique booths and bought and sold very similiar type of stuff.But the one common thread is that as one’s business grows the need for a CPA not only to do your taxes, but to act as a consultant is very valuable. Especially the COGS / Inventory issues. Yes, one pays for a CPA Services but they also are there to answer any questions you have throughout the year. They become your partner in running your business. I talk to my CPA every 2 or 3 weeks.
Deductions are a big topic and area of our business which impacts what we owe in taxes big time. How to cost out any personal items sold, mileage, home office deductions, utility expense, procurement cost, cell phones, etc., etc. and as Mark is saying there are simple ways to do all of this, but as a seller you have to take the first step to get help by reaching out and get a CPA who will become your business consultant.
Just my opinion on the issue, but a CPA is more than just a form filler at Tax Time, he is your partner in your business success.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Maybe some type of chemistry lab instrument like a “specific gravity separation tube”, or some type of “sediment or liquid separator”
Or an ugly bud vase. LOL 🙂Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art
Yep.. John Deere pays people / has a team who do nothing but scourer the internet for products and the word John Deere associated with it. We know. We got two VERO’s from Ebay and a Notice from Etsy and Bonanza [had some cross listed] and got notices from all of them. There are a lot of hats, toys, patches, jackets, vests, that are fakes and knock offs.
I actually reached someone at John Deere and asked how can you tell and the first thing they said is anything silver is not there’s or original. Our hats had a silver embroidered back ground. So, down they came and to make sure they did not get back into the market place we didn’t donate or re-sell them. We gave them to a few friends who were farmers and handymen. They loved them and we told them about the John Deere story and they said they would just dump them in the trash once they were done with them.
for what it’s worth.
Mike at MDC Galleries in AtlantaFor a good portable solution we have used the paper and cloth backgrounds. In both cases we taped the thin background to a 1/2″ metal conduit pipe we got at HomeDepot. We made two large 6″-8″ “S” hooks out of a white coat hanger. We then find a place to hang the “S” hooks [nail on the wall, the shower curtain rod, stick up Command Strips etc., etc. and hang our back drop. When done, we roll up the back drops on the metal tubing and lean up in the corner and put the wire hooks in a drawer.
Also we have used an old movie screen in the past. It rolls down into it’s own metal case, flips verically and stores away. When we needed it Raise the rod, flip it sideways and pull up the screen, place on the top hook and then raise it up. You can adjust a movie screen up and down at both the top and bottom. That screen was about 4×5 ft or 5×5.
But figuring out how to roll backdrops up for storage and unrolling them allows the most flexibility. We have dark ones, light ones and several textured ones. Also you can buy a wooden handrail at home depot that comes I think up to 10 to 12 ft. long and cut it to the length you need. Roll up every thin backdrop onto a metal or wooden dowel like core and just hang and unroll as needed. Then place your stands, bases and mannequins in front, shoot, then roll everything back up.
Hope this gives you a little food for thought.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
Agree.. Take it off. If you had bought it anywhere else it would not be on there and you still would have listed it, described it, sold it and shipped it.
Now if it read Neiman Marcus.. well leave it LOL. 🙂Also try flippertools.com. It was created and maintained by one of the SL members. There is a menu that has his calculated shipping tool. As Sharyn states, Canada may prove to be a hurdle, can’t remember.
But at his site you put in the dimensions, the weight where from and where too and it will provide a suggestion as to the lowest cost method to ship, what size box to use, show USPS, FedEx and UPS [again not sure about Canada].Worth at least checking it out. He also offers a label printing service that he says is competitive with Ebay’s.
Hope the site helps you out, we use it a lot and have it book marked.
Mike at MDC Galleries and Fine Art in Atlanta
