Yep, that’s right.  I’ve finally gone and done it.  I’ve closed my eBay shop this morning.  No more astronomical fees, no more losses.  I feel liberated!

Let’s face it, there are much cheaper places to sell your wares than at greedBay.  Especially for cottage industries like ourselves, be they candle makers, soap makers, card makers, any hand made or craft based businesses.  Yes, eBay is a worldwide household name but it has gotten too big for its boots.

So, I’ll be concentrating my efforts on my own website, and listing on handmade and crafty sites.  I probably will list a couple of bits on eBay as auctions or buy it now.  This will be just as marketing and another way to drive taffic to my main site.  By listing a couple of bits and bobs rather than having a shop, I can save money and use the eBay name to my advantage.  It’s a  good way to promote new items or offload old stock and hopefully gain new customers that can be converted away from eBay.  Especially if they can buy the same item for less direct from the website AND get a whole lot more besides.

So during the Christmas break I will be sending out emails to everyone who purchased goods from my eBay shop and let them know of the benefits of ordering direct.

Tags: eBay, ebay store

Just thought I’d let people know that if you want any candles or melts for delivery before Christmas, then I must have the orders in by Monday 15 December.  Any orders received after this date can’t be guaranteed to be delivered in time for Christmas.

I’ll also be shutting down for a couple of weeks.  It’ll give me a bit of free time to tidy up the house ready for Christmas.  It’ll be a good time to take an inventory and get stocked up on raw materials and most importantly plan for 2009.

Tags: Christmas orders, last orders

Well, it’s finally happening.  I’m starting to get returning customers ordering straight from my site rather than eBay.  They’re coming over to the dark side, mmwwaahh, haha

Seriously though, it’s good, as the prices are cheaper on my site, no nasty eBay fees to cover.  I will definitely be closing down my eBay shop permanently in the New Year.  I’ve kept it open as I was still getting a few orders.  What I’ll do in future is just put up some auction items and then get them to order more direct.  That’s the plan.  Just use it for advertising purposes.

Well, that didn’t take very long.  Put up a couple of my products on Folksy the other day and I had a sale within a couple of days.  Definitely well impressed as it took me nearly a year to get a sale through DaWanda.

I guess it’s a case of the right person being on the right site at the right time.

Woohoo.

Tags: Folksy

I’ve just signed up to 3 new UK based crafter marketplaces.  You can now find me at Folksy, MISI and Coriandr.

I’ve listed only a couple of items for the time being.  I’ll add some more over the next few days.  I’m not too sure what sort of response I’ll get but hey, it’s another way of generating business, in addition to eBay and DaWanda.

I’ve not had much success with DaWanda.  I’ve made one sale since January when I joined.  Then again I haven’t really been poulating it properly.  I think I listed too much too soon.  It seems that one or two items every few days is the way to go with these craft sites.  I think I’ll have to revisit my listings at DaWanda.

Tags: Coriandr, DaWanda, eBay, Folksy, MISI

Just added 2 new fragrances for autumn/winter.  They are The Great Pumpkin and Christmas Rumball.

I’ve got a couple of new blends in the pipeline.  Definitely having lots of fun creating my own fragrances.  Some have smelt absolutely revolting, but others aren’t too bad and they are slowly being added to the “possibles” list.

Tags: christmas rumball, Fragrances, the great pumpkin

I’ve just started another blog, only this time it’s more of a how-to blog.  As you may have noticed I have a couple of Squidoo lenses, which are basically information lenses about Cosy Candles and about making soy candles.

They are there for purely Internet Marketing purposes, trouble is that up until recently Google loved Squidoo.  They were good quality sites with relevent content for search engines.  What has happened, as is always the case with something this good, is that it gets abused.  As word spread, so did the amount of spammers who built lenses to bombard the Internet with crappy content and fill everybody’s inbox with junk mail.  What does Google do?  Drop it like a hot potato.  Consequently everybody who was using Squidoo to drive traffic to their genuine sites have been hit very badly as no lenses appear on Google.

So to compensate that I’m just going to run a duplicate blog site on Blogger, who are owned by Google, just as another means of generating traffic to my main site.  I won’t shut down the lenses as Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines are indexing them.  Unfortunately, 98% of all searches in the UK are made through Google.  So, I do need to target those Google users.

If anybody is interested it’s at www.makingsoycandles.blogspot.com.  I’ve also put a link on the right hand column.  Fingers crossed it’ll give my main site some added weight in the next couple of months.  I’ve also placed some Google ads on it too, we’ll see what happens.

Tags: google, internet marketing, msn, search engines, squidoo, yahoo

Just found out that one of my UK suppliers has now stopped trading.  It’s such a shame as we have so few candlemaking suppliers in the UK.  Unfortunately, it isn’t the credit crunch that has hit them, but rather, ill health.

So sad as they are a nice couple and Keith has worked so hard to build up their business.  I found them so handy as not only did they sell i bulk, but they also offered smaller quantities which came in so handy for months where I’d run out of wax but money was a bit tight.  You know what I mean, so I would order a smaller amount just to tie me over till I was flush again.

So RIP Candelights.  I do hope that maybe one day they can start up again as we definitely need more suppliers.

Tags: candle making supplies

I’ve finally finished my new look website.  It would have been up sooner, but other projects took priority.  Still it’s finally done.  I will be adding small bits and bobs to it over the coming couple of weeks.  I’m looking to submit it to various shopping directories hoping that it will generate some good page ranking.  I also need to update the testing zone, coming soon and new fragrances pages.

I hope that every one will find it easy on the eyes, but more importantly easy to navigate.

I’ve made the decision to shut my eBay shop down.  Earlier in the month they announced changes in fee structures for shop owners.  Most of us smaller sellers have a basic shop at a cost of £6 per month, however from 25 September it’s going to go up to £15 per month.  Lately eBay have been making sweeping changes and it is the little guys who are losing out.  I know of quite a few sellers who have just had enough of eBay, or “fee Bay” as it is now being called, and are leaving it for other auction sites or are building their own shopping site.

Quite frankly, I feel that eBay has lost the plot, and that they are now just looking to keep the big time players on board.  I never did sell much from my shop, but rather from my auctions.  As I have my own site I tend to use eBay as a marketing tool, so I will continue to list my goods as auctions, but with a “buy it now” option too.  At £15 a month it isn’t worth me keeping a shop going.

It is going to cost me more to list and coupled with the fact that the cost of my raw materials and shipping have gone through the roof due to the rise in oil costs and soy prices, I will be raising my prices.  They won’t be drastic, but I can’t swallow the excess any more.  I haven’t raised my prices for 2 years but I’m hoping that there won’t be many more huge increases by my suppliers.  I will be working out my new price list ready for 1 October 2008.

Tags: ebay store, price increase