Spreading Out The Eggs

You know the saying. Don't put your eggs all in one basket. With selling online it seems to be the same way. Don't expect one venue to do all your selling for you. Well I am not getting rich but I am finding other baskets. One of the best finds for new baskets I think is Silkfair.com. This place has put a lot of little things in place to make life so much easier for small and large businesses alike. If you are small like me all listing is made easier because you do it all on one page and you can load multiple photos at one time. Categories and subcategories for your shop have just been added. If you look at the sidebar here you see that they have a widget available and you can make one for any shop you are looking at from the shop home page.

From a forum update you can see they have some exciting things in the works

If you play a bit with the category tree, you'll notice there are function to rename / re-sort, and trying to incorporate the category tree management inside 1 import file will be difficult.

Looking back, when we specified exactly 2 months ago the short term plans, we completed most plus others that came in. Additional short term major items that's planned or are currently active :

- adult content identification : we're coming to realize that there is no way we're going to be able to avoid this, so, we'll have to develop a structure / mechanism to deal with it.
- removing sandbox payment gateway settings. Too many shops having that enabled.
- tagging of unique / handmade products/shops vs mass produced products
- customization of stores. This is our main focus.
- custom category tree in listing imports/exports
- GoogleBase / Google Shopping submission - huge delays on this function, but we're back at it
- Purchase Order exports
- infrastructure upgrades
- Resolving IE problems / Firefox 3 compatibility issues
- Homepage change / personalizations
- more tuning of site for search engine

Not yet started :
- coupons/discounts
- shipping calculator
- scrapbook

Right now listing an item is free but a 3% commission is taken from sales. I think the plan is to charge for video files if you use them as well as for premium shop customization features. Did I mention you get your own blog and can set up your own forum? I am so pleased to see that being able to offer discounts and a shipping calculator are on the list. When it is on a list to get done at this place it seems to happen and not drift off into cyber never never land where they hope the users forget about it. Many of you know what site I am referring to here.

Take a look. It can't hurt. You may find yourself a new basket for your eggs. Mine is right here.