My husband is the webmaster of a site called Homeschool Buy. Each month he writes a newsletter. This month he asked a friend, Chris, that he has been in contact with since they went to high school together (about 30 years ago) to write about his business and offer some internet auction selling tips. His story is an interesting one.

Homeschool Buy Newsletter
volume 1, number 14
May 11th 2007
And now for something completely different…
An idea occurred to me this week to borrow some expertise from a old friend of mine. One of the reasons I want to focus one the business aspects of selling on Homeschool Buy is that we are noticing more and more that the site has become a vehicle for many homeschooling mother (or fathers like myself) who have a burden to augment their family’s income. In a two-income economy like ours, homeschooling puts families at an economic disadvantage and I see so many stay-at-home parents trying to bridge that gap with the internet. In fact, that’s been a burden of mine, to find avenues for parents who stay at home to earn money.
I first met Chris Meek in high school. His family lived just a few miles from mine, and on the same bus route. I found out then that his grandfather had opened the oldest furniture store in the city of Tulsa. We became good friends and kept in touch over the years. He got a degree in business and worked as a stock broker for a while. He found the cut-throat financial world not to his taste, so he eventually left that and had an idea for an internet business. He managed to raise several million dollars in venture capital funding and even recruited me to helped him on some of the eCommerce programming as he built the business. He was not far from going public with the business when 9/11 happened. As with many other companies, that dried up all future investments which left it with no way to continue. All his hard work vanished almost overnight.
At about that time he was also diagnosed with cancer, so he was dealing with both the collapse of his business, the loss of several years worth of hard work, and the threat of cancer. But one thing Chris is, is a fighter. He beat the cancer and once his health improved he visited Indonesia with his wife, to visit her parents, and stumbled on a Dutch-owned furniture factory tucked away in the middle of a remote Indonesian jungle. The furniture was mahogany and teak, and native craftsmen would walk from the village to the factory to hand-build the tables, chairs and other pieces they provided. Chris scraped together what savings he and his wife had managed to hold on to and ordered a cargo container full of furniture. Through family connections, traveling and the internet he had most of it sold before it arrived and immediately ordered a second. From there his business blossomed and he used the internet, especially eBay to open doors his family had never explored before. You can visit his online store at http://TeakBoat.com. Over the years he’s had the opportunity to acquire a massive amount of experience maximizing the effectiveness of selling via online auctions.
I asked Chris if he would mind offering some advice for our members trying to establish family businesses through Homeschool Buy, and he graciously agreed to.
Chris’s Tips…
Tip #1. Your products must be easy to find using keywords which are actually being entered into the online auction, search engine, etc. You may have a great, nifty new product that you are excited about. However if no one knows that such an object exists, they might not be searching for it. You must find a way to get traffic funneling through your auction / web site. You might need to study auction/search engine/google adwords to find out how many people are searching on various keywords. This will tell you how large your market is relative to other keywords/products.
Tip #2. Online shoppers respond to very high-quality pictures. In my opinion, this is crucial. Think very carefully about how to best photograph your items. High resolution, colorful, interesting, nice background, good lighting, no clutter or squalor in your photographs! Your excellent pictures will make big profits for you!
Tip #3. Your item descriptions should also be “colorful”. Do not be afraid to write inventive, entertaining, even “prosy” item descriptions with many adjectives and interesting text. When you have found some text that works, along with powerful, quality photographs, save them carefully. These are valuable business assets that you can use long into the future.
Tip #4. Sales margins need to be higher than you might expect – this is a biggy. Depending on how large an inventory you are required to maintain, try to double your money or perhaps earn a 60% ~ 62% sales margin. This is not easy to do, but it is the difference between treading water and making money. You will only be able to charge what the market will bear for your goods, so increased margins can normally best be accomplished by purchasing inventory at bargain prices. This is where your homework and research will pay off. If after diligent research you find that your margins will be significantly less than 50%, you may decide to deal in different products. Different products trade at different margins, and some people are very successful working at much lower margins, but I still live by this rule.
Tip #5. You must think about capital requirements – If your business is very successful, you run a very real risk of “growing yourself into bankruptcy”. This is because fast growth normally cannot be financed solely through current sales. Grow fast, but think carefully about finding a little more capital to finance increasing inventories, increasing variable and fixed costs. I know that this sounds hard to believe, but it can be a very real problem.
Tip #6. Be prepared to tweak your offerings. Selling online is about trial and error. Change things around until you find something that works.