Numbr and Craigslist, making selling easier
On and off I sell a few items here and there on ebay and Craigslist. If you're not familiar ebay typically charges you a listing fee and then they get you again when you sell the item based on what the item sold for, they get you coming and going. Now September is an exception they're waiving some of their initial listing fees this month. We're all still waiting for Craigslist to start charging, but for now it's completely free. You can post stuff at any price including free, just watch out for the crazies out there looking for the free stuff. It's a great alternative to your local newspaper and I've sold a refrigerator and a sectional so far, items that would have been a little difficult logistically to list and sell on ebay, with Craigslist I just put the responsibility on the buyer to pick the item up. This brings me to the service I used in my most recent sale that worked rather well and was of course the right price, free. Numbr.com will give you a temporary phone number, even one close to local if you're near a major city, for a period of time from 1 day up to a month. The phone number forwards to whatever number you specify, numbr also offers other services like blocking calls from 9pm to 8am in your timezone and voicemail via email. I think when listing items a couple of things are really key, good pictures, a good descriptions, and ease of communication. Email doesn't quite do justice when selling a big item, so it helps if the buyer can call and talk to you and ask a few questions to avoid wasting their time and yours. It's nice to be able to screen out the crazies, without giving out your real phone number and personal information, the numbr service is not limited to use with Craigslist, but could be used in any situation where you'd like to give a number out but have it expire after a period of time, I could think of several ways to put it to use.
aStore – The Simple E-Commerce Store
Amazon has a tool for Amazon Associates that allows you to build and customize your own Store with any selection of products from Amazon.com. We currently use Amazon for their context relative Omakase Ads contextual text links, we were curious about the aStore so we built one. You can create up to 100 stores with a custom selection of Amazon products for each store, you can choose entire Categories, Subcategories, ListMania Lists, or pick individual products one by one to include in your store under your own named Categories and Subcategories with individual customized descriptions of the products you choose. Each Category page you create also allows you to provide a description of the Category to be displayed on that page. After you choose your products you can specify the colors to be used on the site and a header logo, if your lazy you can choose a predefined color scheme. Once your store is built you have a choice of linking to it directly, including it in an iframe or a frameset, the code to do this is generated based on the option you choose. Amazon pays you the Associate rate on all sales. Amazon's associate program is very accessible to new publishers and doesn't put stringent requirements to sign up and get started. We've turned the store into a product recommendation area of the site, WebGuy Recommends, which allows us to showcase the products we recommend. There's a great article on My Digital Life on techniques for integrating your aStore into your blog.