March 2005

After being up for just one week, the online auction Wagglepop has decided to close its doors.

Started by Ray Romeo, a longtime eBayer who simply wanted to make the online auction world a better place, he cited denial of service (DoS) attacks on the site, harassing emails, disinformation campaigns against Wagglepop, and the final straw: physical threats against his family as reasons for shutting down.

As sad as it is that there are people willing to go to such lengths to try and destroy another person's work and life, I believe we can learn a lot by studying the failures, not just the successes, of others.

So what can we learn?

1. First and foremost, eBay is king.

Many eBay sellers made the mistake of completely dropping their eBay business to move to a newcomer. Now they have nothing.

2. Second, the online world is much different than the offline world.

The attraction to doing business online is obvious, at least for me. For a little over a year now I've been earning a few extra bones each month simply by paying for web hosting. I've reached a point, after about a year's worth of "work", in which my entire home business is nearly fully automated.

What little work I do consists of responding to the occasional email from customers. This is where the negative aspect, from my view, of doing business online comes into play.

I liken people in the online world to drivers experiencing road rage. Studies show that drivers, who feel separated from the real world in the protection of their vehicles, are far more likely to behave in a manner they would never dream of behaving were they not in their car.

The same applies in the online world. Since there is no direct contact with me, people have to make judgments about the type of person I am based on their experience visiting my site. If somebody attempts to purchase something from me and something goes wrong, it's often automatically assumed that I'm a scam artists and I should be shot and killed. At that point I'll generally receive a nasty email stating that I should be dead (or some equally undesirable message).

I don't know too many people that like to be told by someone they've never met that they should be dead. While nobody likes it, some people are unaffected emotionally by insulting comments. Others, like me, have a difficult time separating the business life from personal life.

Luckily I receive very little negative email. However, in the next few months I'll be introducing a new product which I plan to push very hard, and expect to sell a lot of. And with that many potentially unhappy customers, I'm sure to receive A LOT of nasty and seriously insulting email.

So what am I going to do? Keep in mind that almost nobody that experiences a high level of success did everything on their own. Nobody is an expert at everything. I am no expert at handling customer support requests; especially ones containing derogatory and/or insulting comments.

Since I'm no good at dealing with customer support, I plan to hire an employee or two to handle all support issues.

The lesson here? First: Don't drop everything to start something new. Keep what you have in case of failure. Second: Don't be just a business owner, be a manager! Delegate out those tasks which you cannot, or don't want, to handle.

Don't demand from yourself that you be able to do it all. Look for and accept help where necessary. Afterall, as renowned motivational speaker Anthony Robbins once said, "Success unshared is failure!"

If you're selling online using eBay Stores, then you might be interested in hearing about Macromedia's recently released Contribute 3 for eBay.

Don't already have an eBay Store? eBay Stores allow you to list fixed-priced items rather than the traditional auction-style listings. eBay Stores is designed to be an easy and simple solution for anyone wanting to create an online store quickly and easily. Click here for more information on eBay Stores.

Contribute 3 for eBay is designed to help those with no technical skills easily build a professional looking eBay Store.

This specialized version sells for $99 from the Macromedia store, a $50 discount off the full version. If you already own the full version of Contribute 3, you can download the eBay extension for free.

The full version can be bought for $149. If you are looking for some easy-to-use software to help you build an online store front, then you might want to look into spending the extra $50 to get the full version.

I've gotta tell you, we love Macromedia products around the office. We use Dreamweaver for website design and use Flash to create training materials (such as the Data Export Tutorial).

While Dreamweaver and Flash require a good level of technical knowledge to fully take advantage of their power, Contribute 3 is designed for the "layman". Even those with very little technical expertise should find Contribute 3 intuitive and easy to use.

In last month's Marketer Monthly, I reported OnlineAuctions.com as a newcomer to the online auction field.

The correct business name is actually Onlineauction.com. The website can be reached at:

http://www.onlineauction.com

Please note that the site appears to be experiencing problems (possibly the same DoS attacks that plagued Wagglepop) as the site was not consistently available at the time of this writing.