It’s late and I had a wonderful evening as my other godson visited me. Just as I had worked a bit more on our project after he left, I came to realize one issue that really keeps me thinking now.

If you take a look at the worldmap in the very bottom right of this blog, you will see a world map. All the dots are people’s places who have visited my blog.

None from South America, none from Russia and besides South Africa none from Africa as well. That is really weird as statistically I should have gotten a visitor. But to me, this somehow reveals that we are really living in 3 worlds.

Once in a while you have to lean back and just let things be as they are…especially if you got an actual case of the flu that’s what I did over the past 4 days and fortunately I am feeling better now. I had terrible headaches and wasn’t able to spent much time on front of the pc. There was anyway not too much to do as we had to wait for eBay on allowing us to do cross-border trades.

Cross border trades

As I told you last time, we have succesfully setup an eBay-account using the data from RS who has a singaporian residence address. As this is the key to having a legitimate singaporian eBay account, we took this data and had RS establish his eBay account. Everything went fone and dandy until we were to post the first offer. By the way, the first offer would be a set of stereo headphones, as we get these kind of very cheap in an electronics store in Frankfurt run by a couple of Indian or Pakistani guys.

Anyway, right after I wanted to sent the first offer, a warning in red letters appeared on the screen: Cross border trade, please contact ebay-security before proceeding. Well, I did and 24 hours later I got informed, that I should provide my phone number. I did, and 24 hours later, I got informed that the number does not match the number given during registration. Well, what surprise.

It dud of course not match, as I had provided the number from the singaporian address, but in the mail t eBay I was providing my mobile number as I wanted eBay to contact me directly if they would have any questions about the account.

So, I wrote a new mail, this time explaining the whole background: company established in Singapore (well, not quite yet, but who cares), business requires me to stay in Germany (hence german mobile number) and that I would be back in Singapore soon if I would be required to show up personally at their office.

Well, this seemed to be sufficient as they wrote me back today, that we are cleared and can proceed to do cross border trades. Yihaaaa. Finally.

So, enthusiastic as I was, especially as I felt pretty much better today, I just wanted to post our first offer only to learn: sign-in on eBay is down. You can browse but you cannot log-in. Superbe merde.

Well, I took some time though to write our “About Me”-page and designed a bit more in our offer. Hopefully tomorrow we will have a reason to celebrate our first officially released offer. Stay tuned.

Ok, that was a most ridiculous title for my post but as I was just before analyzing the keywords which brought most hits to this site I had to do a little SEO in here as well.

Google beats Text Link Ads by far

I have no idea if I am allowed to post this or if this is an infringement of any secret Google laws. But as I have paid for it, I somehow feel entitled to post this. So, pay attention, my personal AdWords statistics. Yes, AdWords not AdSense, as I, opposed to many other losers am actually one of the paying members of the marketing community. Someone in the end has to do it, so that the others can make money by putting ads to their sites, right? (Fascinating though, that I make money as well by AdSense. For the moment being, my income is even exactly like what I have spent so far on advertisment. Nice).

But enough tension. Here are the statistics:

That’s actually quite nice I think. 28 referred hits. Text Link Ads has netted me so far 2. Two. 2 as in 0. For 40 US-$. No wonder that they have been bought by some other marketing company. We should have been buying that money making machine. And at the same time, they even do not feel dumb enough to even write me mail after mail, how important it is to stay with them for at least three month. That was however two weeks after I cancelled my marketing budget with them for the next period, so if they would know anything about marketing at all and would have a nice CRM-system, they should analyze their customers status first before sending out mass emails that make them look like total fools. i am really looking forward, what Patrick Gavin will write me tomorrow to convince me to stay. I said it before, and I stick to it now more than ever: Google beats them all for the moment being, as long as one is not able to get individualized ads on your site. But enogh of the marketing fuzz.

Product selection

As said yesterday: We start purchasing now. A couple products to chose from for the testing phase:  [Ok, now here we would have placed some nice earphones (throughout fakes of course) and some other nice stuff for under 1 US-$ a piece. However, DHGate.com is experiencing some problems, as every attempt to display item details leads to an error page from their tomcat server. So, by luck we will post this tomorrow then].

What we will have still to optimize then, is shipping and handling costs versus purchasing costs. What do I exactly mean by that ? Well, take e.g. the earphones we have in mind. They will cost us 23 US-cent a piece if we buy 100 from DHGate.com. However, S&H will be a whopping 190 US-$ (even after rebate!?). So, we would pay a total of around 210 US-$. The almost same type of earphone would cost 2.30 US-$ a piece on GlobalSourcesDirect.com. S&H would be about 30 US-$ with them. That would make it a 260 US-$ if we would buy from them. However, let’s be real here: If we would have to make a decision by reputation pints alone, we would have to go with GlobalSourcesDirect.com, as they seem to be a bit more professional and trustworthy. On the other hand, every cent counts. So we will go for the underdog first and really give it a try. Once we fully switch operations to Singapore, S&H will not be that much of an issue anyway.

eBay and g-Mail

I will now go and setup our first eBay account on singaporian eBay as I have just gotten the required adress data. This account will get a nice GMail adress and we will give it a start. See you tomorrow, sleep well