Weekly Update #8 - We skipped a week!

Hello everyone,

We messed up, or rather, I messed up, completely forgot to post the update for last week! So what have we done in the last 2 weeks? Honestly not that much, we're sorry! We're overrun with Axolotls! They're amazing creatures and we've managed to sell about 50 in the last couple of weeks but there's still over 200 more! If you know anyone that's interested then point them our way ;)

Aside from that, sales on eBay are going strong, we're seeing a big increase on our weekly sales volume, this can vary massively as one day we'll have maybe one order then the next we'll have 9. Me and Georgie we're both massively ill over the last couple of days and that is of course the time when we have record sales!

A bit of advice for anyone out there looking at getting into setting up their own fish business (or business in general!) Start small with a few products, then as their sales increase, expand to more, we only have 12 products (we started with 3, 8 weeks ago!) at the moment but that's great for us, we're bringing in enough sales to pay for this website and pay for the food of all of our animals, we're even starting to make enough money to pay for our food shop! Now this is only possible because I'm also working full time, and honestly I don't even want to begin to try to figure out how this would be possible without working full time. So for those of you looking for a guide on how to do this full time, this unfortunately isn't the blog for you!

Saying this though, if you want to get some cash on the side then something like this is great, the maintenance costs are what you put into it. If we didn't have the website then the only maintenance costs would be to pay the 30p listing fees for each eBay item each month, which as long as you're making atleast 1 sale in each month, you should get back! Everything else comes out as and when you make a sale, sure we wish people would buy from us direct, as we're making more money for the same price for the customer, but we also understand eBay are a known brand and people are more comfortable in having that relationship with eBay than they are with us if something goes wrong. Its just something we're working on.

So yeah, its what you make of it, if you have 100 products on eBay but don't manage to sell on half of them, that's cutting into your profit, and if you're only making 10-20p on each of those items but then its taking you 10 minutes to wrap and post off each of those items, you're getting paid £1.20 an hour, is it worth it? The real trick is to find a product where you can make a decent amount of profit on, isn't too hard to prepare, and is in a fairly unique position. So, easy right! You won't know until you've tried it, we've had plenty of ideas we thought were killer, only to put them out onto eBay to get absolutely no interest, we've even had 2 products where we made no sales at all so now we're just selling them at break even costs to get rid (and even then we're struggling to get rid!)

Thats all for this week! We'll try a little harder for next week, the website is going through a bit of a revival this week so we're hoping it'll be a bit easier to see all of our products and how best we can serve you!