The right software (LINK)
November 17th 2007 16:39
Before we came to the UK for our holiday, I was selling some stuff online via TradeMe, New Zealand’s very successful equivalent of eBay. I mostly sold books, since I’ve had some experience in that line, but occasionally we sold some pottery, the odd toy and other items. Our next ‘bestseller’ to books was jigsaws. Surprisingly, these were very popular. We used to frequent garage sales on Saturday mornings, to stock up our shelves, and one day we came across a woman selling a large number of jigsaws, all of them in mint condition because they’d belonged to her mother and she only ever did them once.
Trying to keep track of the stock was a bit tricky at times. I use a programme called MYOB (mind your own business) but I’m sometimes tempted to go for something more like shopping cart software, which keeps everything on track much better – and does more of the work for you. MYOB is good at calculating the accounting side of things, but isn’t much good (at least the version I’ve got) at dealing with stock. There’s too much manual labour, as it were, that has to go on, to make it completely satisfactory.
I probably won’t be going back to selling online so much, with having a fulltime job in the offing, but it’s still something that’s fun to do. There’s nothing more satisfying than parcelling up a book or jigsaw and sending it off in the post. It brings a great sense of closure. It’s similar to what it used to feel like when I sent off a typed manuscript off to a publisher. You felt you’d finished with that thing and could start something fresh.
Trying to keep track of the stock was a bit tricky at times. I use a programme called MYOB (mind your own business) but I’m sometimes tempted to go for something more like shopping cart software, which keeps everything on track much better – and does more of the work for you. MYOB is good at calculating the accounting side of things, but isn’t much good (at least the version I’ve got) at dealing with stock. There’s too much manual labour, as it were, that has to go on, to make it completely satisfactory.
I probably won’t be going back to selling online so much, with having a fulltime job in the offing, but it’s still something that’s fun to do. There’s nothing more satisfying than parcelling up a book or jigsaw and sending it off in the post. It brings a great sense of closure. It’s similar to what it used to feel like when I sent off a typed manuscript off to a publisher. You felt you’d finished with that thing and could start something fresh.
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