I'll give you an example. I recently bought a Gucci bag that I intended to keep for myself. Mistake. It's white. I have a two year old son. You see where I'm going with this. I got a really good price on the bag, but in order to recover my costs I have to sell it for 20% more than I paid for it on eBay, whereas on Bonanzle I would only pay $5 to complete the transaction.
As the summer comes to an end and the Fall merchandise starts to roll in it's becoming more difficult for me to find deals that are good enough to make a profit on eBay. I keep thinking that if I ever do decide to turn this into a formal business I need to find a way to take eBay out of the equation but continue to get as many views on my items as I do there.
I thought at first that would be nearly impossible, but I recently bought a subscription to Terapeak and got a free subscription to Sellebrity, an eBay reearch service that allows you to see how many people are visiting your items, where they are located, and which items they're looking at. On a GREAT day I get about 114 visits total. On a poor day, like Saturday, I get about 40. On Bonanzle, on the other hand, I get about 35 visits on a good day, and on this blog I get about 18 people visiting and about 35 page loads, again, on a good day.
I'm not sure that I'm really to take the leap into creating my own virtual store and driving my own traffic. I don't have the first idea about how to do that, and as much as eBay is clearly not without its risks, I don't know that I would trust an unknown website more than I would trust an eBay seller with excellent feedback.
What do you guys think?? If I set up my own online store and could offer my items at a slightly lower price (which, by the way, I can do off eBay for blog readers), would you buy from me??
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