John Lawson was a telecommunications consultant for Accenture and founded 3rd Power as a real estate investment partnership. A joint venture with another business entity went sour, leaving John with a large mortgage on an investment property he wanted to unload. As things got a bit desperate in 2002, John turned to eBay. His company is now a Platinum PowerSeller and John is an eBay Certified Education Specialist and ships over 100 packages a day, generating over 2,000 feedbacks a month on eBay.
John and his partner now work fulltime at online sales, having left corporate America behind. In 2005 they signed on to ChannelAdvisor to handle the volume. It was in October 2006 that John got serious about the online store that comes included with the ChannelAdvisor package. "As (ChannelAdvisor CEO) Scot Wingo likes to say, we decided to take off the training wheels," he said.
John hired a company to help design and implement a solution that worked with his existing ChannelAdvisor store platform. He said, "Since that time I personally have taken the steps to get the design to the stage it is today. Currently the store is doing 20% of our volume and we have NOT begun the Google campaigns or real optimization."
While he may only get a few orders per day on the web store, John says the average sale there is usually a multiple order, sometimes with dozens of items. "The income per sale is 2-5 times what the average eBay sale is."
"The initial results in sales have been very encouraging and now I want to crank up the heat." John said all comments are welcome, including comments about design, ease-of-use, and flow. "Anything else that a user could think of is always helpful for me. I don't want to limit their imagination and observation because I simply need help."
Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and AuctionBytes.com and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). Follow her on Twitter at @auctionbytes and send news tips to ina@auctionbytes.com.
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