eTown Shopping Blog


  Marketing, Advertising online when the economy is slow.
Published: October 26, 2008 at 14:13:33 by eTown Manager
Summary: Marketing, Advertising online when the economy is slow is not something to take lightly. Many resellers stop selling when they stop marketing to different media types. When big corporations see sales down they increase marketing do you do...
Tags: | Selling |
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No real news for resellers that the market is down in most product groups.

Merchants trying to keep sales steady during slow consumer spending have many challenges.

Some online merchants and resellers are offering lower priced items and budget items to meet their economic needs.

Merchants, online retailers, sellers, collectors and dealers really should follow the old school rules of direct marketing and marketing to specific consumer groups.

Major retailers typically increase advertising campaigns just before seasonal spending months and when the overall sales have become stagnate.

What does the small merchant typically do during slow retail sale periods?

Small merchants often withdraw from marketing and advertising with the hopes of waiting out the slow consumer periods. This actually works against the smaller merchants when you look at the balance of the retail industry.

Many shoppers are looking for smaller companies to do business with. If the prices are the same we feel consumers would select smaller businesses to do business with.

Small business might want to approach marketing as big business does and keep advertising in front of consumers continuously.

The return on your marketing investment will show gains over the long term and for the short term returns you know you are out in front of consumers doing the best you can. It is better than doing nothing at all or hiding under that marketing rock.

Not Advertising is not the answer!

Steady yourself and use classical marketing methods with high tech resources. This means advertising in online shopping malls like eTown Shopping and other locations over the Internet making sure you target your local consumer groups as well.

Merchants telling us about the lagging times and doing nothing regarding advertising are actually allowing another small merchant or big corporate to take that advertisement position away.

Drop out of the marketing world and you drop out of competition.

Let's look into the Marketing Crystal Ball.

"Do I market when my sales are down?"

Yes, continue budgeted marketing and advertising during slow periods.

"Do I expand my marketing to cover different demographical groups?"

Yes, by offering your products and services to new groups you increase name awareness and brand awareness to that select group. If consumer are not spending on your product type at least they will see your name, products and services which is a very important part of creating new markets.

Our crystal ball can't predict what your future is going to be. But we can say that by not marketing at all will give you a return of nothing at all.

Allow us at eTown Shopping the opportunity to show you what we can do for your small business.

Click Here for, Online Storefronts and Sales Account Information.

 


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eTown Shopping Blog


  Pay No Fees as a merchant you pay enough in time, customer support, business hours and headaches.
Published: October 15, 2008 at 18:05:45 by MW
Summary: No one time Setup Fee, No Per Sale Fee, No Commission fee, No contracts to sign, No special application fee, No SSL to buy, No Shopping Cart Fee, No Programming Fee, No Cost per Click, No Impression Banner Fees, No advertisement Fee, No...
Tags: | eCommerce |
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Stop Paying Fees to Market and Sell your Products Online!

After talking to a few old timer eBay auction type people and seeing the new rate chats they have out. I have to ask

"Why Pay Fees?"

(By the way, you need to really setup a spreadsheet to see what you are truly paying. I'll post my XLS one day but if you need it just ask me and I'll send it to you.)

In the early days selling by fee based commissions really seemed to be the best solution for many merchants online and even the private sellers.

You only paid if you sold an item. Right? Who cares about the listing costs, the reserve costs, the extra image or gallery view costs we only focused on "Pay Commissions only if you Sell".

So has this Pay the Commissions really worked out for you? Are you really showing a profit and marketing daily more than 5 items at a time?

I'm asking the same specific question I asked one of my eBay'er friends. She can't afford to list items and can't afford to not list them.

The cheaper stuff isn't worth selling most of the time. 12% on average costs to list items under $25.00 which if you do the math and use 40% profit margins you're only taking home pennies in the end.

So when do you start making a profit with commission and listing fee sites? When you sell products that are 300% marked up that's when.

Don't get me wrong, I like the auction sites. I visit often and even used them back in the 90's. When I got my first bill of $35+ for an item that didn't sell and re-listing it was a joke I stopped. I couldn't imagine repeating the same mistake over and over again waiting for the one person in the world to click "Buy Now" or "Bid" on my listing.

Now more than ever I see it as a waste of time because I can market faster and better to Oodle.Com networks which includes major search engines, Walmart, Lycos, AOL, NY Times and more.

So do I pay them listing fees? Today no, maybe in the morning but for now I don't pay a dime. And the best thing about public merchandising is everything links back to the main product page that I host.

In the old days it would be a link, then a redirect then a commission then a pay per click then just maybe a sale.

Today it's List your item one time with no fees, no commissions and list as many items as you would like for a fixed month to month fee and get listed all over the net !!!

It's a far cry from a simple 0.01 Auction no reserve when you know millions don't even visit auction sites. I do believe Craigslist might be a bit more popular to resellers today then any other online site. 

I even use Craigslist to promote a few of my products I sell online. But it would take days to list them all so I let the marketing applications at eTownShopping.Com do all my busy work.

Programmers know best that if it's something you do day in and day out it should be automated so you can focus on other more important things.

eTownShopping.Com is the place to expand your markets and advertise your products.

 


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eTown Shopping Blog


  Your Products and your suppliers words on a spreadsheet do not help all that much
Published: October 15, 2008 at 17:04:39 by eTown Shopping
Summary: Your Products and your suppliers words on a spreadsheet don't help all that much when it comes to online marketing. Words are Key on the Internet and shoppers should be the first people you ask the question "How did you find us",...
Tags: | Selling |
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Your products don't jump out and grab shoppers from search engines.

It's just not going to happen and shopping by pictures still hasn't been perfected.

So what remains is our words. Hundreds of words. Keywords. Key Word Phrases. Everything that sells in your store from a big poster size advertisement might not work so well online.

Continuing the tips from "How do I create a Successful Business Online for my Local Retail Business in Town?"

Have you ever noticed the number of sites that use all the same product descriptions and part numbers? Drop shippers are famous for this and even those stores that setup all your product inventory online do the same.

Same old words that no one really searches for is what we see.

Gift items are the best example we can use today. A gift is just what it is a Gift. How would you sell a gift in your store? It's sold by Sight and Touch but online how would you setup your Sight and Touch feel with words?

The difference between professional merchants and just merchants is the creative level of how they use words to describe an item.

Merchants that copy and paste from the manufacturers brochures are only going to get competitors researching competitors for the most part. But then you might have that stray visitor that actually picked up a company brochure from a trade show that stumbles onto your site.

When all merchants use the same words who will be on top in the search results? The merchant that has been online and active for the longest period of time normally but other factors come into play that I'll discuss later.

When marketing online demographic studies need to be made.

Your first question for each and every product you sell should by "Who are my customers?".

Once you know who your customers are for a specific product then ask "How will my customers find this product?" The answer to that question would be worth gold if we all knew it. But the answer is actually a question. "How do I sample market for the best return?".

That's the key when marketing outside your realm or the products normal demographics. You need to experiment and do it in such a way that results can be measured quickly which means "Days" not "Months".

eTown Shopping markets under different demographics. We use our merchant stores, specialty malls and our main shopping malls to measure different results of marketing.

Like Google allows you to setup a second website with different content that Google will display alternately in search results to measure which site design, layout, content works best for your business.

The same method is used in marketing with Google, Adwords can be used to measure how effective your marketing is regarding your advertisements.

But what about generic search results? The way to measure generic search results is to actually market the same product several times but in a different light.

If you Paper Clips sold at Paper Clips Dot Com aren't reaching office people your biggest market might not be achieved. If you setup Paper Clips Dot Com then Office Clips Dot Com you can focus on more things in a office that would attract more visitors by keyword searches which should lead to sales if they are qualified searches and not "How to Sell Paper Clips" when you are actually a supplier of paper clips.

Double Listings are not what search engines like to see but you can list and display often your products.

eTown Shopping has a master list and can adjust the master list to display all or a specific product group. When we market a product for a merchant we typically link to the general page of the merchants store then market the product as a listing in the eTownShopping.Com website. This allows us to list the product to many different locations, list the company name, managers name and the companies website as well. When we market as a group single products start appearing in search results when before they may never have appeared in any results.

So what do you do with your marketing words?

Try blogging about your product. Simple 250 word blog will do the trick. Describe everything you can in as many different ways you can.

Words are Key and Content Rules.

When you are ready you can email us two of your products. We will setup your products and market them. Then 5 days after we have them online search for them as you would then search differently. We will see the results in our reports and forward them to you.

It's a simple business practice of "Show me the Money". We know our marketing works very well and do stand behind our claims and methods.

 


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eTown Shopping Blog


  How do I create a successful business online for my local retail business in town?
Published: October 15, 2008 at 15:47:12 by eTown Shopping
Summary: How do I create a successful business online for my local retail business in town? This question has been asked hundreds of times by merchants. You will find depending on who you talk with many different answers. What you know today will...
Tags: | Selling |
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How do I create a successful business online for my local retail business in town?

If I had use a single word to describe best what a merchant should do to create a successful online business the word would be "Budget".

When you budget your world you control your expenses and can measure you success or profits much easier.

If you are hosting your online store and your total costs for your store are at or below $30.00 per month you can budget the total number of sales you need to make to pay off the costs of owning your online store.

Marketing Budgets need to show Return on Investment or they need to be dropped.

When you look at your online store as a marketing avenue are you seeing income from your efforts?

"Traffic Guaranteed to your store doesn't mean anything at all."

A store that has 3 visitors each day and 5 sales each week is better than a store that has 500 visitors each day and 0 sales each week.

Let's start off with one our first rules at eTown Shopping.

1. Traffic doesn't mean anything in terms of success.

This also applies to busy streets. Your shop like ours years ago might be on a very busy street. But out of the 20,000 cars that drive by daily how many actually stopped into your store? Then out of those how many actually purchased products?

Traffic is not what you need to focus on when you are starting your store or if you are expanding your current store markets.

Next Article to Read. Your Products and your suppliers words on a spreadsheet do not help all that much


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eTown Shopping Blog


  The Better Way of doing Retail Business on the Internet
Published: September 25, 2008 at 15:32:13 by eTown Shopping
Summary: If your business depends on sales and you have tried everything you can think of with your current online store then it is time to try the eTown Shopping mall for all your products and services. We are your online marketing SEO and...
Tags: | eCommerce |
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The Better Way of doing Retail Business on the Internet.

Did we create a new wheel or just make the old squeaky wheel quieter?

We are please to say that we have actually reinvented that old fashioned wheel called eCommerce and Online Retail by giving those old wheels better bearings. Now we are making things roll in the direction of better sales and increased profits for your company.

If your business depends on sales and you have tried everything you can think of with your current online store then it is time to try the eTown Shopping mall for all your products and services.

What makes us better than doing it on your own?

We take away the responsibility you currently have keeping your website up to date with the ever changing SEO and SEM industries.

We do all the technical work for you and free up your time so you can focus on your retail business full time. We create opportunity and give you time to create better advertisements and marketing plans for your business. 

If you sell less than 10 items or over 100,000 items you have the responsibility to make sure your product descriptions are what people are searching for. You need to keep in tune with how shoppers shop and what shoppers are looking for and buying. 

It’s your responsibility as an online merchant to know when market changes take place and you need to stay in tune with market trends.

We help you by providing the time to market.

If you had to update your website every month to keep up with the most popular search engines you’d most likely put in the same amount of hours we do keeping our shopping malls updated.

When you put in 5 to 14 hours each day on design and applications for your website you take away the same amount of hours that should be used for marketing.

We look to help just over 1,000 merchants totally to become successful with their online business. When we focus on your needs and keep our networks updated we know success will be knocking on your storefront in a very short time period.

It takes time to create your store. We can have your store active in less than 5 minutes but then the content and products are come from you the merchant. We will review your stores content and make suggestions to keep everything you have in your store relevant to the products and services you are selling.

This is called SEO and SEM work which typically costs $20 to $1,000 per hour.

Our special applications allow us to do 95% of all SEO work without really working hard at all. But it’s the additional 5% that we have to do manually and we will work with you to accomplish our perfect 100% SEO and SEM network design.

We start off with the best in platform web pages. No outdated HTML is allowed in our shopping mall. We specialized in cross platform operations which include mobile devices and all types of browsers.

We need to keep shoppers happy by allowing the quickest “Find and Buy” system online today. With 99% of our network designed around the “Two Clicks to Checkout” we know when shoppers see a product they will only be 2 clicks away from buying that same product.

We add more in that shoppers can buy from any number of merchants and use a single checkout. The orders will be split and sent to the individual merchant to process the orders.

This has only been done in the largest of Amazon size sites as of this date.

From Buy Now pricing, Best Offers to Auctions we have just about every major feature application included in all of our storefronts and shopping malls.

The benefits you gain by hosting your store with programmers and online marketing gurus are endless. Your learning curve to what you need to do technically to run a successful store online has just been lowered because we do most all of the technical application development in house and update your storefront as soon as we have proven enhancement to give you.

Why learn the hard way by hosting your store out all by itself when you can be a member and a big part of our online shopping mall network.

Visit our Accounts page to view our prices. You might be asking why they are so low but don’t ask to loud our accounts department might hear you.

We are committed to the success of small business owners in the United States. With the slowing economy affordable online marketing and storefront hosting is in great demand.

Allow us to help your company make the sales you need to grow stronger.

 

 


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eTown Shopping Blog


  How do you know where you are sending your personal information and your credit card information?
Published: September 22, 2008 at 09:06:11 by eTown Shopping Security
Summary: Keep your personal information safe by limited access. Do you know how many people you are actually handing your credit card to when you shop online? Limit the numbers by learning how online companies process payments and who offers...
Tags: | Shopping |
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How do you know where you are sending your personal information and your credit card information?

We like keeping the shopping community informed about privacy issues and especially issues that concern personal information and credit card information.

Know who you are buying from and know who is collecting your personal information.

We are the leaders in small business security regarding personal information from our merchants and shoppers.

We follow the fundamental rule of “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” but add to that statement by following our company policy of “No Personal or Financial Data is stored online”.

Our privacy policy is very clear. You need to provide information to process your orders but after your order has been received you may change your personal information by moving it or changing it.

We never store credit card information nor do any of our merchants. We use the best in the industry to handle payments and all of our companies in our stores and all of our service companies are based in the United States.

We all know about identity theft. When you hand your credit card over to the person at the checkout counter you watch your card like a hawk. You don’t want others to see the numbers and the name so you protect your personal information very closely in the real world.

But for online shopping do you know just who you are giving your personal information to?
In our shopping mall and our storefronts ever merchant and reseller is interviewed. We want to make sure we learn as much as we can about each person and their business. When we trust a merchant and see the customer service the merchant offers we add to the “Peace of Mind” shopping we strive for within our shopping malls and storefronts.

But what about those stores that you might want to purchase from that aren’t within our network?

If I was to tell you how to research who is collecting your personal information and credit card information this article would be at least six pages long.

Instead of writing six pages of technical procedures and running the risk of confusing you to the point you never get online again I’d like to say what we do at eTown Shopping that helps keep you safe.

We research and interview each and every merchant that sells within our shopping mall. We also follow up on confirming resellers both the long term and short term resellers.

We control the data stored not our merchants or resellers. We allow you as a shopper to change or close your membership account. We also allow you to skip the membership completely and only supply your personal information one time so your order can be processed.

Your payment information is never stored by us or any of our merchants that sell within our shopping mall. We use payment processing companies to handle your information. This cuts down on the total number of people that have access to your credit card information to only one, The Payment Processor.

So next time you go shopping start asking “Who is handling my information and how many people are seeing my personal information?”.

If you can’t get the answers you are looking for come back and ask us to interview the merchant you are buying from. If they qualify for our services you can surely trust them with your shopping order.

Have a great safe shopping experience!

eTown Shopping Mall Security Manager
 


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eTown Shopping Blog


  How do I setup my online Antiques and Collectibles store?
Published: September 22, 2008 at 08:20:09 by Murray n. W.
Summary: How do I setup my online Antiques and Collectibles store? Find tips and information about setting up your online Antiques and Collectibles store. Learn what you need to be successful and how to promote your products with the technology we...
Tags: | Selling |
Blog:

How do I setup my online Antiques and Collectibles store?

This is really an article that promotes our services but you can take some of the information and apply it to just about any hosting company.

When you start thinking about setting up your Antiques and Collectibles store online you need to keep in mind that your sales will come only from valid search engine friendly sites.

The Market Demand for Antiques is always steady but many collectors have a difficult time finding listings by those selling online.

If you use Craigslist to list your antiques they are quickly sent to the bottom of the list because of the design and nature of classified advertisement sites.

We recommend anyone selling online to use Craigslist to cross market products and services but we do not recommend using them as your primary point of sale.

You might have looked at the eBay Stores or the Yahoo Stores. Both have their benefits and both have their drawbacks.

Yahoo stores typically cost more than a collector selling online wants to pay. You have to spend extra hours getting things perfect on your site then hope you become indexed.

The control you have might seem to be the best but in reality yahoo stores aren’t the best location for your antiques store. eBay offers storefronts for your listings and there is a very high traffic flow. But don’t forget about the 20 million plus Internet users that don’t shop at eBay.

eBay has it’s drawbacks as well, it’s not search engine friendly per product listing and ends up costing more then you might expect. The layout and browsing of eBay seems to take to long so you as a seller start using other locations to market your eBay store.

When you have to search for other resources to market your primary site you are on the wrong path in our opinion.

Your primary site should offer the best in search engine optimization programs so you don’t have to learn each time Google, Yahoo and MSN change their algorithms.

You also need to have a central location for your Blogs, articles, comments, policy, about, specials, auctions pages. Anything about your company and products all need to be with the same link and a browse, search feature for your site needs to be user friendly.

So where do you setup your online store? Well we know hundreds of hosting services, web designers, programmers and SEO people that are more than willing to setup your store and get you going.

What we want you to learn about before committing to a new store or a second store is there is more than hosting, designing, programming and search engine work. You’ll see the crowds growing and we are leading the pack when it comes to search engine marketing.

That’s right, add one more term to your IT book. SEM. This is normally outsourced but many companies are finding that it’s better to help merchant’s market products before marketing pages or a company name.

We have since 1998 marketed products first and always worked to get every product indexed in the major search engines. It’s well known if you don’t display your products you can’t make a sale and if you don’t sell you shouldn’t have a store online that adds to your monthly expenses.

So basically you need a full time Web Designer, Programmer, SEO expert, Hosting and SEM Company.

Welcome to eTown Shopping and the eTown Shopping Mall Network. We do all of the above and more. We even proof read your descriptions and help with keyword marketing of your products.

So when you start looking for online services to promote your business take a look at us as well. We don’t advertise in the glossy styles in our own website here because this site is for shopping. But we will tell you that when your products are in demand they will find you listed here in our shopping mall and in your store if you host your company with us.

Even if you have an eBay or Yahoo store you can always open a new store and start expanding your markets.

If you have any questions feel free to contact us.

 

 

 


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eTown Shopping Blog


  Building a Garage Sale and Yard Sale Site for Early bird Collectors and Professional Garage Sale Hunters
Published: August 12, 2008 at 17:04:01 by eTown Shopping Manager
Summary: We have a great plan for antique dealers and collectors. When we go live with our Mall Garage Sales website that offers a mix of high tech marketing with typical garage sale postings we are going to be building a collectors paradise at the...
Tags: | Selling |
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If I start out by saying "I have a secret" would that get your interests up?

If I said you can sell your garage sale items online for 30 days free would that spark any ideas?

Now if I said that collectors and professional garage sale hunters typically visit our site looking for great items that normally they wouldn't find in their local towns would you start thinking this might be interesting?

Well let me get right to the point.

We are starting our online Garage Sale shopping mall this week and it might be just what we all have been looking for.

We are not taking away from sites like Craigslist or any of the thousands of classified advertisement sites online.

We are not even looking to take away from local marketing in your local newspaper.

What we are building is a place for garage sellers to post online free in a community designed to be hunted and searched.

Our collectors visit from all over the United States and Canada. We get many questions about listing garage sales early so collectors can browse over what people are offering before the day of the sale.

We are starting in the southern states and working our way north to the Midwest. Our goal is to bring to the attention everyone that is planning a garage sale to start listing items early so collectors can be first to bid or offer on items.

The idea isn't new but the methods are. When we take a classified advertisement and place it into a search-able website with categories that seem to be endless you can browse and list items more specifically.

When we create a method of be detailed you will find your products being found more often. We don't just group everything under one category and expect you to spend hours viewing page after page. We want you to quickly find what you are interested in and to do that we have to teach garage sellers how to list items so collectors and professional garage sale hunters can find the listings fast.

It's going to be slow growing but with word of mouth and allot of rewriting of the marketing manual we have for garage Sellers we think we can help two community members with one website.

Look for our new Garage Sale website at www.mallgaragesales.com

 


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  Markets are created by Demand and Collectors have a special talent of creating demand in a slow market
Published: August 04, 2008 at 15:56:44 by eTown Shopping
Summary: Markets are created by Demand and Collectors have a special talent of creating demand in a slow market. If you are into antiques and collectibles and find your items are not selling you might be marketing only part of your inventory....
Tags: | Antiques |
Blog:

Written by: Murray W. July 24th 2008

I'd like to share a little secret with you about shopping online for Antiques, Collectibles, Jewelry and other classical memorabilia that some of us just can't get enough of.

Collectors have a special talent of shopping local shops and even garage sales that sometimes produce some great finds. Other times it's bust just about every weekend.

Now that you have your little treasures you start thinking and wondering how much you could get for your new found prise.

Now this isn't really a secret but I thought I would use the word "Secret" to make you feel that I'm sharing with you something very special. (Hey, book sellers to riches say "Secret" thousands of times in place of the word "Tip")

Well, actually I am telling you a secret but it's more like a marketing tip and you might want to spread this secret around to others.

Markets are created by demand.

You know as a collector or store owner that if you don't show what you have for sale you can't sell it.

If I had to ask "Do you have any Depression Glass Plates?" and you said "Let me look in my storage shed in Canada and I'll tell you next month". I might not stop by your shop again.

Actually it wouldn't be due to the fact your items are in Canada.

It would be the fact that you are hiding somethings I've been looking for and out of total disbelief that you didn't know I would be in your store this year you didn't have the one item I have been looking for all my life!!

Have you ever heard something so out in left field like that? Well when I told one collector about what I was interested in they actually told me it would take a month but I'll get it from my storage and that was in another state.

I've listened to many collectors that use eBay and other auction sites. They tell me "It's not in Demand" or "No one is buying".

Well I know first hand that the line "No one is buying" isn't true at all but maybe the line "It's not in Demand" is true.

The idea of a product not being in demand can't be measured globally when you are talking about a single site.

Let's take for example eBay and eTown Shopping. The two sites are very different in that one is very large and one is very small but let's bring this down to a single product level so we can compare things one on one with even the biggest of corporate monster sites.

If I was selling an Antique Shop online and used eBay to determine if Antique Shops were selling by watching the active auctions and counting the number of bidders.

That's very basic and many eBay'ers use that tactic to measure "Market Demand".

But what is missing here is sample markets from other places other than eBay. Maybe eBay shoppers aren't looking for your Antique Shop but you find that Ruby Lane has big demand for buyers.

Here's the secret that's not a secret anymore.

Markets are created by demand and not all demand is measured from a single site or even a measured sampling of sites.

The true method of measuring demand is to learn that those really searching for what you have will use every method possible. They are the hunters of treasures and you have the treasure chest locked up and not showing anyone where the key is located.

So why not allow people to find your treasures and measure your market demand by marketing your products?

We know this week collectors have looked for "Antique Shops" online. Also several have been looking for Old Tin Signs with markings from the historical highway Route 66.

Here's a short list and then I'll tell you all about how I get these lists.

  • Antique Shops Online
  • Mall Jewelry Stores
  • Route 66 Tin Signs
  • Doll Stores
  • Hobby Shops and stores in Baton Rouge
  • Motorcycle Shops online
  • Power tools
  • Retailers in Baton Rouge online

Above is a typical short list of my market research showing what people have looked for when they stopped by eTown Shopping.

Also many questions are sent to us here ranging from "How to price Antiques" to "How to shop online".

The questions are actually more specific and we help by finding merchants or one of our mentors that can help when I personally can't answer the question like: "How to price antique salt and pepper shakers". Now that question I sent to an Antiques Dealer.

The Secret is you have to create your market which means you have to advertise your products. eBay and sites like eBay charge you each and every time to list and need you to sell it.

So if you have followed me and the secret of "Creating Market Demand" you might find yourself not saying things aren't in demand and start finding yourself making your product listing in demand here at eTown.

It's the same for shoppers when you see items with no price or OBO (Or Best Offer) you know that seller is looking for you to make the first step in the bartering process. You never know what price you might get. If it's from one of our collectors that doesn't look outside of eBay you might find a steal because they just want it gone.

Happy Shopping!


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eTown Shopping Blog


  Antiques and Collectible Markets are created by demand.
Published: August 04, 2008 at 12:55:41 by eTown Shopping
Summary: Markets are created by demand. Antique Collectors have always looked for items that are in demand or soon to be in demand. But how can you tell when someone is looking for what you have to make demand for your collectibles...

Blog:

You know as a collector or store owner that if you don't show what you have for sale you can't sell it.

If I had to ask "Do you have any Depression Glass Plates?" and you said "Let me look in my storage shed in Canada and I'll tell you next month". I might not stop by your shop again.

Actually it wouldn't be due to the fact your items are in Canada.

It would be the fact that you are hiding somethings I've been looking for and out of total disbelief that you didn't know I would be in your store this year you didn't have the one item I have been looking for all my life!!

Have you ever heard something so out in left field like that? Well when I told one collector about what I was interested in they actually told me it would take a month but I'll get it from my storage and that was in another state.

I've listened to many collectors that use eBay and other auction sites. They tell me "It's not in Demand" or "No one is buying".

Well I know first hand that the line "No one is buying" isn't true at all but maybe the line "It's not in Demand" is true.

The idea of a product not being in demand can't be measured globally when you are talking about a single site.

Let's take for example eBay and eTown Shopping. The two sites are very different in that one is very large and one is very small but let's bring this down to a single product level so we can compare things one on one with even the biggest of corporate monster sites.

If I was selling an Antique Shop online and used eBay to determine if Antique Shops were selling by watching the active auctions and counting the number of bidders.

That's very basic and many eBay'ers use that tactic to measure "Market Demand".

But what is missing here is sample markets from other places other than eBay. Maybe eBay shoppers aren't looking for your Antique Shop but you find that Ruby Lane has big demand for buyers.

Here's the secret that's not a secret anymore.

Markets are created by demand and not all demand is measured from a single site or even a measured sampling of sites.

The true method of measuring demand is to learn that those really searching for what you have will use every method possible. They are the hunters of treasures and you have the treasure chest locked up and not showing anyone where the key is located.

So why not allow people to find your treasures and measure your market demand by marketing your products?

We know this week collectors have looked for "Antique Shops" online. Also several have been looking for Old Tin Signs with markings from the historical highway Route 66.

Here's a short list and then I'll tell you all about how I get these lists.

  • Antique Shops Online
  • Mall Jewelry Stores
  • Route 66 Tin Signs
  • Doll Stores
  • Hobby Shops and stores in Baton Rouge
  • Motorcycle Shops online
  • Power tools
  • Retailers in Baton Rouge online

Above is a typical short list of my market research showing what people have looked for when they stopped by eTown Shopping.

Also many questions are sent to us here ranging from "How to price Antiques" to "How to shop online".

The questions are actually more specific and we help by finding merchants or one of our mentors that can help when I personally can't answer the question like: "How to price antique salt and pepper shakers". Now that question I sent to an Antiques Dealer.

The Secret is you have to create your market which means you have to advertise your products. eBay and sites like eBay charge you each and every time to list and need you to sell it.

Self Promotional eTown Shopping Mall Snippets

Because eTown Shopping has display window marketing applications we can run advertisements on items that are not priced but that are actually being used to see what price they would bring by "Best Offer" or "Market Value" offers.

End of Self Promotional Embedded Material

So if you have followed me and the secret of "Creating Market Demand" you might find yourself not saying things aren't in demand and start finding yourself making your product listing in demand here at eTown.

It's the same for shoppers when you see items with no price or OBO (Or Best Offer) you know that seller is looking for you to make the first step in the bartering process. You never know what price you might get. If it's from one of our collectors that doesn't look outside of eBay you might find a steal because they just want it gone.

Happy Shopping!


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Shop with Route 66 in Winslow, AZ

Casual Outfitters Ladies Fashion Jacket with Metallic Gold Finish

Casual Outfitters Ladies Fashion Jacket with Metallic Gold Finish
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Price $24.88
From: Winslow, AZ, 86047
Category:  Clothing and Accessories