Re: Order Fulfilment anyone? Quote:
Originally Posted by yankee Do yo have any competitors?
My BEST partners and my best warehouses and shipping facilities were once and still are competitors. We just so happen to compete for a greater and more profitable good these days.
Better buying power, better support, vacations are easier, etc... and no, it was not always easy to arrange this. It took time and dedication and not everyone is mentally capable.
Now if you can find someone who can COMPLIMENT your business that is even better. So someone who is not directly competing.
I like to work with other sellers because they understand the business and how everything works. | The category that I'm at has couple of "bigger" sellers in the UK but even they are not THAT big, as I've already surpassed their monthly sales, using stealth.
Mostly just couple of small shops that specialise in the category and have been around for 20 years and they don't really focus on online sales as such, for some reason.
By looking at their eBay stores and what they list and how they list it, its pretty obvious that I turn over more stock than they do and I'm more of a business and less of a hobby.
I'm pretty hesitant about the prospect of working with competitors because I don't believe I'm in a strong enough position to really hurt them when the push becomes shove- I'd much rather keep doing what I do now because it seems to be working very well.
I reckon that there are some categories where sharing market and space is very, very smart business move and sometimes pack mentality works very well, but I feel that the category that I'm in is all about just being as unique as possible with my own procedures and sourcing ways.
In the future, it might be very smart move to buy one of my competitors and just take over a business, so that they could look after my current business. Already existing business structure would be easy to take over and all they'd have to do is go from 200 sales a month to 2000 sales a month and thats easy.
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