eBay success!

I’m feeling good about the eBay project.  We had a few sales and the store has been up for about a month.  This is more than we ever would sell on the old store, which was also costing us a lot more to run per month.  eBay is much faster – with the combined help of Lindsay writing the descriptions, we’re getting the new Turkish jewelry put up.

PDail is talking about running a special to get people who live outside of Raleigh ordering products…It’s probably going to involve the store customers having an incentive to contact their friends/relatives and encourage them to get on our store!

If you still haven’t seen the site, check it out here:  http://stores.ebay.com/Beleza-jewelry-and-accessories

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spring break

Hi everyone!  If you have landed here from either the Poole College of Management or the NCSU Bulletin, thanks for taking time to read about our project!  The interns are not in the “office” this week (aka the library); we are all going on break.

If this is the first time you have heard about our project, check out the rest of the blog!

Here are links to find out more:  Beleza Beleza on eBay

Interested in fair trade?  Contact me at ajmarti2@ncsu.edu

Also…some very good friends of mine from the Caldwell Fellows program are headed to Atencingo, México for spring break.  Check out Saul Flores’s story here: The Walk of the Immigrants

eBay update

Our team is working on putting the store on ebay still. Today, Christian and I tried to put more lambas up, but for some reason ebay wouldn’t accept atll 27 of them so we’ll have to continue that later. Lindsay and I put up the alpaca and brass semiprecious bracelets and rings from our fair trade store as well as the pashmina scarves. We also had David Hunt from News Services, who is a public communication specialist, visit us today and take pictures for an article that will be posted in the ncsu.edu website about our fair trade store, Beleza.

beleza in the news

We made it to the Technician, NC State’s Student Newspaper!  Check out the story:

Local Shop Founded on Fair Trade Philosophy

Another day’s work

Today I learned how to put the fair trade store‘s items on ebay. This is not a hard task, just time consuming.  Tomorrow Lindsey and IJ are going to take more pictures to put up for the store, hopefully they’ll portray the lambas in a way that provides the customer with a better view of them. By putting our items on ebay, our fair trade store is hopefully going to become more successful.

Todays Mantra: E-Bay

Take a breath. Inhale. Exhale.    E.    Bay.    E.    Bay.    Concentrate all your energy on listing items and providing a visually balanced storefront for your customers. Now focus on your goals for the next couple weeks. Try not to overwhelm yourself. Feel the excitement from the upcoming item photo shoot enter your heightened consciousness. Now list more items. Don’t forget your other mantra. Fair trade store.   Fair.   Trade.   Store. We want Beleza to flourish in the online atmosphere and continue to build its reputation as a Fair.   Trade.   Store.

time to shoot some photos

We’re working full-force on our eBay site – bringing a fair trade store online is no easy task.  PDail has picked out which products we should feature first.  I’m using an iterative project management technique – we will put our first 25 products up.  By going through this cycle once, we can learn from what we are doing before putting up too many things.  This is a good process I learned in a software development class last semester – it lets people working on the project have more flexibility in what they do.  I’m amazed by all of the features eBay has – when we make product listings for jewelry, it asks us for different details than it would for, say, our scarves.

We’ve had to make lots of business decisions – what will our free shipping offer be?  What kinds of shipping will we offer?  Which products should we list?  The list goes on…

Some of our interns might model our products for the photoshoot, which would give us nice personal photos to put on the Beleza site.

this blog is so powerful.

On Friday, I had the interns target the term “fair trade store” in our blog entries.  While we are coming up on the first page of google results for “fair trade,” we weren’t even the second page for “fair trade store.”

My reasoning for choosing this search term is that many people are searching for more information about the concept of fair trade when they google “fair trade” but if people want to buy products, they’re going to jump right in and hit “fair trade store.”  This cat and mouse game of keywords is what makes SEO so exciting.

It’s only monday, and we’re the second choice for “fair trade store.”

so fast - it happened in 4 days!

Click your heels three times and…

 

Think fair trade store, Fair TrAde StoRE, FAIR TRADE STORE!!!  *poof* You now find yourself in the mystical, wonderful world of Beleza. You can find a scarf to go with those smashing ruby pumps and strut down the yellow brick road like it was made of 14 karat gold. Well, perhaps someday… For now we’re trying to make Beleza synonymous with the phrase “fair trade store” in the minds of shoppers and in the computerized brains of search engines everywhere. It’s a BIG and ambitious move, we know, but I think we can do it!

simultaneous strategies

Today, I honed down the schedule for eBay.  It’s going to take about a month to get it all rolling.  Pretty exciting work!  While eBay is going to drive more business online, we also want to get more people in the store.  Because – let’s face it – once you go in our fair trade store, you can’t leave without buying something.  We’re writing another proposal for Groupon.  If you’ve never heard of it, you should check out their website and maybe even sign up.  Groupon is a revolutionary way to attract customers by sending an offer to by a coupon.  The offer is only good for one day and Groupon writes fantastic business reviews to bring people on board.  Their business model is different from traditional advertisers; they don’t charge any up-front costs.

PDail is in Haiti right now, leading a relief trip.  We are still collecting shoes at Beleza to be sent with the Red Cross.