Maternity clothes: a success story
Thursday, January 24th, 2008After my third son was born, I decided to sell all of my maternity clothes. I’m a bit of a clothes hog and had a good variety in different sizes so I figured I could sell all of the pieces on eBay.
I took pictures of every piece of clothing, grouped like items together, wrote descriptions and uploaded everything to eBay.
Labor Cost: At least 20 hours of my time at a conservative $15 an hour = $300
Listing fees: $29.49
Total cost to post to eBay: $329.49
Total revenue from eBay: $37.92
Profit(loss): ($291.57)
Since I only sold 8 of the 26 sets listed on eBay, I created a photo gallery and sent the link around to stay-at-home moms in my area. At this point, I was in the hole so I just wanted to get the clothes out of the corner of my bedroom and get some money for them. I was willing to sell the whole lot for just $150 (or less!).
I wasn’t getting any bites through viral marketing so I decided to place a free ad in the Pocono Record and poconorecord.com (where I also happen to work). The placement took less than five minutes. Here’s the ad copy:
Mostly MOTHERHOOD brands
Entire lot, $150, 28 shirts, 4 skirts
13 pants, 2 shorts. Pick-up only
Call 570-582-3814
I couldn’t fit the long link to the gallery in the lines allotted but two days after the ad ran in PRINT, I got a call from a woman in nearby Tannersville, PA who was interested in buying the whole lot. I e-mailed her the link to the gallery, she called me last night after checking out the pictures, and we’re finalizing the deal at noon tomorrow when the buyer comes to pick up the clothes.
Print ad cost: Free
Total revenue: $75
(Okay, I’m not counting the $300 in labor because I already spent that on eBay.)
Lesson: Print still drives quality leads. Online works well as a tool for more information. Why can’t we have unlimited pictures with our free ads online? Oh, because our online classified marketplace is so tightly tied to print we can’t leverage what’s good about online while also leveraging what’s good about print. We have to fix that.
And, eBay is over-rated if you have a lot of stuff and no time to spend learning the ropes.