The state of purrpetual motion ecommerce.
The current active stores are Elevenboxes and BrickMine.
Elevenboxes is live at ebay. This ebay account is now a purple star with 500+ feedback.
BrickMine is a new attempt with a standalone website hosted on 3dCart. Big jump away from sites like ebay, ecrater, bonanza, and vendio. So far no sales and no traffic to speak of, but it hasn’t been up for long.
There is a reason ebay is still around. It’s easy to get started and you start with traffic.
With the vendio store closed the inventory for Rock the Couch still needs to go.
A category on Big Box of Games is the current solution.
http://www.bigboxofgames.com/rock-the-couch/
Will it work?
This experiment is to determine if adding google checkout helps any. More traffic is good, more sales is best.
The first additon will be to the Eleven Boxes Bonanza store
Stay tuned for results.
Google Adsense had Domain parking available. It looks to be similar to the Godaddy parking solution, except without a monthly fee. I’m trying it on one of my undeveloped domains to see what happens.
Visit DudeCards.com to see what a google parked domain looks like.
The Rock the Couch store on Vendio is being shut down., The traffic is low and many of the tools on Vendio are tied into ebay and Amazon which I’m trying to leave behind so the decision has been made to shut down the store.
Once I corner the orange juice market I’m rich Mortimer, rich.
I’m ready to start selling again after taking some time off and the sites are back up.
Before doing any more experiments I’m waiting a week or two for the traffic to return.
The first experiment of 2011 is, can the Eleven Boxes Bonanza store recover to the December traffic levels in two weeks or less.
The holiday movie misquote was from Trading Places.
Update the traffic is back at Eleven Boxes, but not quite to the same levels as December.
I got burned by a seller on ebay. No pun intended. I found a good price for Family Guy and Simpsons games for Playstation 2. When I opened the package it smelled like an ashtray with just a hint of mint. The seller in typical ebay fashion swears they don’t smoke. So rather than waste a lot of time dealing with ebay, I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone. The package will be out of my house and I can see if auctions still work on ebay. My last item sold on ebay didn’t make it past 99 cents and had to be relisted buy-it-now at 99 cents because nobody wanted to risk being out bid for 99 cents and the auction closed with 0 bidders.
auction link
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280597477068&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT
I’ll update after the auction is over.
Update. With two bidders the price went all the way to $1.29. Add the $4 shipping and you have $5.29 for an item I paid $15 for. Now you know why smokers tend to lie about the condition of their items. You wouldn’t bid as high, if at all. Not to single out ebay. I also had the same experience with an Amazon seller years ago who also swore no smoking in the house and that perhaps it was the postman even though the smoke smell was… you guessed it, inside the envelope.
Does a hand picked list on Bonanza increase traffic?
New list created for elevenboxes at Bonanza, Cats in hats.
http://www.bonanza.com/hand_picked_lists/60445
Will be using google analytics to look for inbound traffic from this location.
Results: Inconclusive – links from Bonanza are not broken out in the Analytics output
Added a link for elevenboxes to the listings at http://whats-your-talent.com/
Sent an email with details to the contact listed on the site.
Metric: Number of inbound links in 30 days
results – waiting to see
Looking at the google analytics for elevenboxes at Bonanzle the average time on site is 8 seconds. The sales aren’t fast enough to match, but the first thought that pops to mind is bull riding at the rodeo.
That average is made up from a large amount of 0 time entries (I smell search engine or the world’s fastest readers) and times in the minutes, ie real visitors.