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Working from home selling products online sounds idyllic to some: There is no boss breathing down your neck, there are no face-to-face clients to please and you can choose your working hours.
There are plenty more benefits to owning your own eCommerce store or making a living by selling on eBay, but unless you take your work seriously, success won't come easy.
If you are just getting your business off the ground, or if you are an old hand, make sure you implement the three points below in order to help your business succeed.
1. Believe in your products
I have around $5,000 worth of stock stored away at my house. It’s been there for almost two years and I’ve never sold any of it. Granted, I haven’t tried and I’m sure I could sell it if I actually listed the products online. But I haven’t, because I don’t believe in the products.
It’s the quality of the products that bothers me. I want to fill my store with beautiful, quality products. The $5k worth that’s collecting dust in my garage just doesn’t meet the brief.
I’ll sell these eventually but I won’t be doing my usual 100% mark-up that I add to most products I sell. And I probably won’t enjoy selling them as much I as I enjoy selling products that I love. Instead, I might feel nervous about my customers being disappointed in the products.
Learn from my mistakes
So how do you avoid this? Well number one, you should always order samples of products before you buy them. Granted, I did this, but I was over enthusiastic and even though my gut told me the products weren’t exactly what I wanted, I was blindsided and rushed into ordering.
Learn from my mistakes and order samples, and give yourself a good week or longer to think about them. Post pictures on Facebook and ask your friends for their opinions on the products (or even better ask your existing customers if you have a Facebook page for your business).
If you’re not in love with the products, or you wouldn’t feel proud selling them to your family or friends, think twice.
2. Treat your at-home work space like a real office
When you work from home, it’s too easy to start sleeping in, working in your pajamas and attempting to ‘work’ while you watch TV.
Get real: Working from home isn’t retirement and it’s likely that when you work for yourself, you’ll work the hardest you have ever worked before... but you will reap all the benefits!
When you work from home, the potential distractions are endless, especially if you have children at home also. The trick is to set up boundaries and let your family and yourself know that between x hours, you are at work. During those hours, you can’t be disrupted unless it’s an emergency or you are taking a scheduled break.
If you can, set up an area where you can work solely such as a spare room or a dedicated office space. Keep this room for work and only for work. When you are taking breaks or not on work time, try to avoid this area so that when you are there, you are in work mode!
3. Get motivated and treat it like a real job
This kind of ties in with what I’ve already talked about above. Too many people think about working from home as being a relaxed lifestyle with sleep-ins, a passive income and a light work load. Sadly, this isn’t often the case. Here are the best tips I’ve read to get motivated and treat your work at home like a real job.
- Get dressed every morning. Wear a shirt and tie if that makes you feel like you are at work. At the very least, put shoes on. There’s something psychological about wearing shoes and I know a few great people who run great businesses from home who swear by this.
- Set your work hours and schedule your breaks. Just like in most regular paid employment, you should have set work hours and you should have allowed rest breaks. Stick to these as much as possible while working from home. The hours don't have to be the same every week: I schedule my week on a Sunday and figure out what hours I can work when. If something changes and I need to deviate from my plan, I make sure that I make up the hours later so that I don't slack off.
- Make sure you get a decent lunch break and get away from your computer.
- Schedule time spent away from the house and with other people. This is especially important if you live alone. It could get mighty lonely spending the working week with just your computer. Reward your hard work with a mid week lunch date with a friend or pack up your laptop and head to a cafe or library to get some work done in the company of others.
- Limit your browsing time. When you are in paid employment, it’s a lot easier to avoid websites like Facebook, Pinterest and other idle browsing. At home when you work for yourself with no boss breathing down your neck, it’s not so easy. Instead of trying to kill yourself with self-discipline, use free website blocking software such as Self Control (for Mac) or Stay Focused (a Google Chrome extension). These let you choose which sites you want to block and for what hours. For example, you can set it so that during 9am-5pm, Facebook and Twitter are blocked, but outside these hours, you can access them as usual. You can also set them up so that you can have 15 minutes per day, or however long you allow yourself, for browsing and the rest of the time, you won’t be able to access them.
I can totally relate to this! I don't have children, but I have a lot of friends who sometimes just don't get it when I need to get work done. Luckily, most friends and family members know that I take my business very seriously and they don't mess with me!
Good on you for making it clear to them that you have responsibilities! :)
BenTenTen,
I agree: If you can't control yourself, you'll never do well in business. However, I think those apps are sometimes just a little reminder that you have work to do and now is not the time to be checking Facebook, Twitter, etc. Works for me anyway :)
I feel you. I'm not a huge risk taker either and I tend to sit on decisions for a little and think things through rather thoroughly before I take action. I'm married to a risk taker so perhaps it's my way of reining him in hehe. I like your habit of writing things down when you stop work. I can imagine it would lessen the time of getting back into a work session as you can just pick up from where you left off.
Have you tried attending local trade shows? It could be a good way of finding US suppliers.
Sounds like you have some fantastic work habits! Good for you :) I really struggle to work/focus in a cluttered environment so I often start my work day a few minutes early and get things tidied up. Clear desk = clear state of mind!
Hm, I'm not sure how much traffic it gets, but http://www.quicksales.com.au/default.aspx is popular.
They have free listing options so you could list a few items and see if it works for you and the products you sell?
A friend and I were talking just at the weekend about a new site wheedle.co.nz that launched here in New Zealand. It's similar to Quick Sales. It's had some bad press because the launch of the website was far from smooth. My friend pondered that generally, eBay alternatives like Quick Sales (and Wheedle) attract real bargain hunters: People who have more time than money. Perhaps unemployed people or stay at home mothers who are looking for a bargain.
This is by no means the absolute truth, but I think it makes a lot of sense. If you are selling items that might appeal to bargain hunters, it might work out better for you... if my friend is right.
If eBay isn't giving you the results you want, consider opening your own store. Here's a link to SaleHoo Stores if you want to check out what we offer:
salehoo.com/stores
Jan
The great thing is that for the most part, e-commerce stores will run themselves after you set them up; you just have to handle order fulfillment and keep paying the costs of web hosting, etc.
I would definitely include on your site information about how frequently you ship items (a friend of mine runs her own store and ships Monday/Wednesday/Friday; an Etsy seller I know dispatches every day, Monday-Friday) and what methods you use.
If you have phone or chat support set up, you might also want to indicate what hours those are available, but otherwise you don't need to post general store hours. Just be aware that you should respond to emails and customer queries within 24 hours.
Good luck!