I used the online auction site eBay a few times to sell items and found the experience unpleasant. The interface is built well, my primary issues were around the tedium of figuring out what happened to payments once they fell into the PayPal arena, reposting items that did not sell, keeping up with the myriad of fees and dealing with unscrupulous buyers who constantly try to make side deals.
Once I reached a point where I had a substantial amount of items to sell, I felt I needed to research the shopping cart options available to small potato peeps like me who don’t have time to build shopping carts to make the process easier. As a full time computer programmer, I had zero availability for complex set ups, I was looking for a solution that was an instant up for a fee and I just had to concentrate on data entry of items, customer service and shipping goods. Unfortunately this is much harder to find than I thought. I started with Volusion, their interface is dynamite and their support is tops but unfortunately I had to deal with so many other things like sub domain set up – which wasn’t compatible with my existing domain provider (and I didn’t even care what the url was – I was just going to link to it from my existing web site menu), additional fees for things like SSL certificates, credit card processors, etc instead of what I actually had time to deal with (which was data entry, customer service and shipping goods).
I guess it is time I do like those fancy people in Hollywood do and just get myself an assistant…after I win the lottery of course:)
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