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General Update

February 28th, 2008 by Kenric

Ebiz1

So I’ve been going over my data on my ebiz1 and I’m not too happy with the way this month is going to finish.  I have had a noticable drop in people just adding items into my shopping cart.  I have more traffic but less potential buyers.

I almost feel like I should overhaul my site.  I know that two weeks of data is probably not enough to conclude that I need a change.  But, there are certain aspects of my store that I did not like from the beginning.

For example, my checkout process is too long.  It is 4 pages!  I want a one-page checkout solution and have been exploring it.  I recently have been looking at Yahoo store and Volusion.com as store platforms.  I really like the Volusion interface but it is somewhat expensive compared my current free open source platform.

Also, with Oscommerce I spend alot of time installing and modifying it to get it working.  If I go with a prepackaged plan, I can be up and running in a day.  Since my plan is to churn out ebusinesses I think I should take the plunge and begin to pay for my stores.  Volusion charges $120 to setup and about $50/mo.  I think I will set up my third ebiz with it and try it out.

Ebiz2

Notice I said third ebiz, that’s because I decided to resurrect my ebiz2 last night.  I did this because I received the 2008 wholesale pricing for the skimmers which made me go revisit my site.  The site was about 95% complete and ready for business before I put it on hold.  It took me another hour to get it up and running so now it’s completely functional and I haven’t spent a dime on it.

The next step would be to set up a credit card payment gateway for $200 and start marketing it.  Right now, I only take Paypal.  I wanted to try something different on this site, an Ebay store.  So I put my skimmers on ebay to see if they would sell.  I priced them pretty low for retail pricing.  I probably am the lowest price online now.  I think I am going to try to low price, no customer service angle for this store.  I want to use Ebay as my main sales arena but I needed to have a legitimate store behind it so people who feel safer bidding on my products.

Google

I told you how I suck at picking stocks last week.  I picked up Google around $544.00 and like clockwork it dropped almost 100 pts down to $450.00 on Tuesday.  I caught some of its upside run by getting some 450 calls Tuesday morning.  I accidentally sold them yesterday morning when I placed profit exit order instead of a stop order.  That error cost me about $1,000 because I didn’t intend to sell at that point.  I wanted to raise my trailing stop order. I can’t really complain because I did exit up $1,000 anyway but it still does suck.

Being on the west coast I need to wake up at 6:30am if I really want to keep track of my stocks.  I don’t wake up that early, so I use trailing stops in case they tank.

Under Armour

This seems to be my favorite stock to trade right now.  I’ve been following it up and down and I’ve been pretty lucky.  I was short on it until yesterday.  Now I’m long on it.  We’ll see how it goes today.  I got 10 March 40 calls at $1.65.

Domain Names

I’m starting to see some decent domain name revenue but it takes a long long time.  You almost have to marinade a domain.  Getting it up and running and just wait and wait.

I have one site that has been up for 2 years.  It’s a one page site with Google adsense on it.  In 2 years it has made $54.00.  But out of that $54.00 it made $8 in December, $7 in January and $10 in February so things are starting to roll in.

My tile page which I just put up 2 weeks ago has brought in $1.76 so far.  At that rate I should make back the $7.00 domain fee by the end of March.  I should be able to tweak that site so it converts better.

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