A Great Life

eBay + Website = Major Win

 

I've started playing around with a hosted website solution BigCommerce.  It looks very reasonably priced and powerful enough to do what I want.  And quite simple to use to boot.  Fingers crossed it has everything I need (it does the kits that I've desperately been wanting!).  I have some skill in this department, but not enough to do it all myself.  I'll still need to enlist the help from a web designer to get things sorted.  To get the payment facility sorted you need a merchant facility with a bank, and a payment gateway service (eWay, PayPal etc).  Once I have the T'c and C's sorted with my legal team, along with the product info and a front page, the bank will review and subsequently approve the merchant facility.  I'll get a payment gateway account and then get that connected to BigCommerce.  From there I can start taking orders and we're in business (again)!

 
 

We're getting serious now - I've just set up a company structure, and will start using that as of next week.  Mentally that has been a big milestone for me. I've always wanted to have my own company!  It's a real line in the sand too - it marks where a little entrepreneurial venture has turned into a real business.  No turning back now, too much time and money is at stake! BAS statements, GST, Tax Invoices - here we come!

 

I'm also setting up to use Saasu - an online accounting package.  The IT geeks call this type of service "SaaS" (Software as a Service) - a subset of Cloud based computing.  Hence the name Saasu.  Saasu has some pretty nifty features, like Aussie banks account feeds, aswell as the ability to connect to eBay AND BigCommerce through connectors (cloud integrators do this for you).  At the end of the day, I can check all my accounting stuff online, no matter where I am.  And if I need to share access I can just grant a level of access commensurate with the bookkeeper's/tax agent's requirements.  The cool thing about all this is that all of my order data from eBay aswell as from the Webstore will be funneled into Saasu - one place to view everything.  Fingers crossed it all works out! I'll keep you all posted on the progress here!

Get On Up

This week was has been a busy one.  And really exciting.

On saturday I missed my flight (slept in duhhh) up to the Gold Coast where I was invited to attend an eBay conference and share my story with a bunch of budding eBay entrepreneurs (400 or so).  So after getting the next available flight I made it with about an hour to spare, phew. It was a really great exeperience.  I really felt like I'd come a long way with the business, after looking out across the room with so many people waiting intently on everything I had to say (probably would have helped if I was holding the mike properly).  Afterwards I spent stacks of time telling people about what my experiences had been over the past 12-18 months and hopefully I was able to give people some insight into what's possible with starting an online business through eBay.  It really wasn't I stuck around on the sunday aswell - being in that environment was a fantastic boost.

I spent Monday working from my hotel room on the laptop.  Damn I missed the dual 21" monitors from home though!  still it was good to get away.  I had a meeting with my eBay mentor on tuesday for around 2 hours, where we brainstormed my next steps beyond eBay and ways to stay front-of-mind with my customers (newletters, website, blogs). Things are slowly starting to come together... but I'm acutely aware that I'm not out of the woods yet.

I also spent wednesday at a business mentoring event which was awesome.  It was good to network with likeminded people - when you're at home in your office you're often by yourself and shut out from all these other fantastic people who are going through similar issues as yourself.

I'll tee up another mentoring call in a month to make sure I'm on track with the internet marketing/blogging/newletter stuff and progressing along (it's easy to get stopped by little technical things or the fear of needing to get it right).

Who knows one day I might write a book about all this! (stay tuned)