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Buying Or Selling Unique Products Online: Sound Advice
I'm constantly quizzed as to why I have so many web sites and sell so many of my Londons Times Cartoon products. "Why not just be a cartoonist," many ask. That's a good question, though, at the risk of sounding cynical, the mortgage must be paid. So I start with something with which they can identify.
I’m constantly quizzed as to why I have so many web sites and sell so many of my Londons Times Cartoon products. “Why not just be a cartoonist,” many ask. That’s a good question, though, at the risk of sounding cynical, the mortgage must be paid. So I start with something with which they can identify.
We want to make money. Ok, ok, that is western education school of thought. Of course we want to make money. But that is a very tiny part of the bigger picture.
Also, one day, and I hope it is in my lifetime, I would love for you, the Internet surfer to google cartoons or funny gifts and two full products of just my stores appeared on your screen. How very neat, eh? Arrogant, sure, but very neat. I am told that in any given year there are approximately 10,000 cartoons on the Internet and out of those 10k cartoons only about 5 or so last longer than a year. This is our tenth year and to be honest, we didn’t even start to monetize the site with stores until 14 months ago; and even think about Google Adwords until a few years ago? Why? Because we really looked at the entire thing as a hobby and everyone was pitching in during our spare time. I remember around 2004 emails began pouring in from publishers worldwide wanting to buy permission rights for our cartoons. I hardly even remembered what that meant. Remember, it was all a hobby for me.
Our main site, Londons Times Cartoons remains free. We want to always keep it that way; as, with 8500 original cartoons, mostly in color, we look at it as a cyber-museum of sorts, and to make it a membership site, as we once thought about doing, to us, would dampen the spirit of the whole idea of it. Why pay for the opportunity to have a good laugh (we hope, anyway).
We have looked at all the available merchandise on which to manufacturer our cartoon images, and stuck with about 60 different items.
Other mass-sellers I’ve discovered are coasters, sweats, hoodies, aprons, clocks, infant wear, thongs, kids tees, sweats, and teddy bears, men’s women’s tops, baseball jerseys, tote bags and a number of other items that have surprised me.
Rather than open one big store, I launched several large stores and a number of niche shops. This gave me a chance to test the market and see who liked what.
Why do we do it that way instead of packing everything into one store? A number of reasons. A lot of people don’t want to go to a large department store, for instance, for one or two items that for which they are looking.
If they seek a funny valentine’s gift, they are more likely to visit our thong store, AThongInMyHeart.Com, rather than RickLondonCollection.com or Ricklondonwear.com simply because they don’t have to wade through other items and can find exactly what they want click, buy, and have it at their door within a few days. (or if outside the U.S. within a week or two). Not too bad a deal, and the prices are excellent.
The same is true for tshirts, beer steins, day planners, greeting cards and other such online shopping stores in which we have narrowed it down to niche marketing. We do not charge any more for products that are in those stores, that are also in our larger stores, we simply offer an alternative quicker convenient buying method for those who do not want to spend all day on the Internet.
Whether buying or selling, we are just laying out common sense guidelines that might work for you. There are many other ways to “do it right”. All of this depends on your style of both shopping or buying. In any case, every time you create a transactin on the web, jobs are created and you are saving time and usually money. It’s good business.
We enjoy watching the analytics from sites that measure rankings and such and see how each site is doing. Generally they remain popular and gain in popularity as the days go by (thanks to you) and it keeps us in creative mode.
If you are an Internet shopper, and enjoy it (as I do) because it is so nice to find items that are difficult if not impossible to find in real shopping malls, you may enjoy comparison shopping channels like Shop.com, Bizrate, Shopzilla, etc. I enjoy using those for home entertainment, computer equipment etc. But they really are not made for the niche shopper looking for that one-of-a-kind product that can only be bought in one store (and its affiliate stores) all at the same price.
I visit Ebay, Amazon.com, etc. daily to see ifa particular online store has items featured there. I check their rankings on Ebay particularly if they are. For instance, 3drose, our manufacturer, sells our products on Ebay, Shop.com, Amazon.com and various other shopping channels. I check their ratings. We are fortunate with 3drose. They have a 99.4% positive feedback rating with almost 12,000 transactions, being one of Ebay’s oldest and largest power-sellers. This helps us, of course, as we want the quality of our products to be the best.