So I dusted off The Collectors Site this week to plug eCom Connections, the new ecommerce podcast from my friends Karen Locker and Kat Simpson and I was shocked to see I posted a whopping two times here in 2010. Twice. What the hell am I paying hosting fees for, jeeze.
The Collectors Site is intended to be my place to post about e-commerce and in its most recent incarnation anything that pleases me. Apparently I haven’t had much to say.
I’m actually more humored than bothered by my disappearance as it at least followed naturally from my New Year’s mantra of a year ago to shut the hell up and sell. Now I haven’t been entirely quiet as I continue to post regularly on Immortal Ephemera, my Classic Movie Star and Collectibles site, and even once or twice monthly on Warren-William.com, my fan site in tribute to 1930s and 40s film star (insert drumroll) Warren William, but I’ve got to make a living and in response to tough times I figured shutting the hell up about selling and actually proceeding to sell was my best bet.
A key factor in keeping my mouth shut has been in circling my wagons and selling where things actually sell. Sorry folks, that’d be eBay. I closed up shop everywhere else (I do still have some non-vintage items on Amazon, only because they’re more or less held hostage by FBA) and stopped experimenting. That’s a little lie, I did try out Ruby Lane again for a couple of months in 2010 after caving into fond memories of monies made there in 2005 and ’06. It just took two months to remember why I left, if you’re familiar with the site I’ll just say that the exclusivity rules are a bummer. But also in 2010 I finally, no FINALLY, found the right off-eBay platform for me, and believe it or not I actually found two and spent several months deciding on which one I’d use. The winner was Ecwid, which is now heavily ingrained across the Immortal Ephemera site, but Highwire, formerly BISI, came in a very close second. I’d recommend either to sellers such as myself who have thousands of lower-priced unique items, total bang for your buck in either case.
I’ve got to step back another year though to fully explain my absence from The Collectors Site and writing about e-commerce in general. Throughout a good part of 2009 I was writing a regular Classic Movie column for the Examiner.com and decided by the end of the year to apply for a second topic, E-commerce. I kept it up for two weeks, maybe even a little less, then totally abandoned it (since I’ve completely abandoned Examiner.com which has turned into a site I can’t even read without crashing my computer anymore, a hellhole of ads of all kinds, big thumbs down!). I stopped because I decided to shut the hell up and sell instead.
I actually scrapped this entire site for a few days. That’s why it has the plain jane default WordPress theme now, at the last second I just said what the hell and put it all back up. In between I killed all of my feeds losing the few subscribers I did have and so I write this as though I’m writing to myself and for all I know I may be. Over the years these posts have moved around on many sites, but they always seem to wind up back here and since this URL has some age to it I may as well keep ‘er up.
I figured I’d continue to write about e-commerce as I liked to write about, little usable tid bits of info that I felt might help smaller sellers such as myself. Again I did that twice last year. I also fell out of the loop of reading ecommerce blogs somewhat as some of my favorites went away and others had gaps in between reportage. I think those gaps were likely caused by the same thing that caused my own e-commerce outage, the stabilization of eBay. Oh I hear the catcalls now, but I’m talking about eBay news, not eBay problems. We can all bitch about DSRs til the cows come home (huh?), but it’s just the same exact bitching we’ve been doing for a few years now. Most of the changes we didn’t like have either long ago killed your business or more optimistically have been adapted and adjusted to by those who continue to sell on the site, either way, there’s no new take on it after all this time.
So I probably should have checked in sometime in 2010 to tell you about Ecwid, but otherwise I don’t think I missed too much. I’m not going to make any kind of meaningful pledge to post here going forward, but I will say that this is still going to be my spot for posting about non Classic Movie related things, especially those little a-ha moments I have when working on something online, moments I think might help other little guys like me.
Talk to you soon?
You can only complain about DSRs until the cows come home because the cows just won’t stand for that kind of talk.