Am I Famous Now…

I surely am no econo-master, I always hated that stuff, but I can read, understand and juggle with numbers. Above all what follows was a very easy exercise.

Today again I was at the charity. Why not, my economical brain told me I can easily survive summer financially. This doesn’t mean I will not take on a bar job anytime, but I have no stress to do so. Anyway, after a while we (management and I) are speaking about ebay. The have been selling smaller stuff and some books on ebay over the last 2 months. They were happy about the results until I knew about it and did a quick analysis.

2 months. One companion full-time on the job. Intakes 800GBP (all numbers have been changed, but are still true enough’ to give a real impression of the situation). Maybe I should also tell you that I hate ebay as a selling platform a) because of the ridiculous prices and b) because of the tremendous high charges.

Within 5 minutes the ebay opinion had changed. Soon I had found 2 ebay invoices totalling 200GBP. Insertion fees and provision on sold items. The person who maintained the ebay job never bothered mentioning those charges since they were paid over their paypal account anyway. Digging a little deeper into the materia we notice that actually the sales total didn’t equal 800GBP, but rather 400GBP. Several items were shipped abroad, one even to India for 50GBP. Hardly any benefits were made on the shipping of the articles. Can you actually imagine they even didn’t keep track of the total shipping costs over that period? Of course we didn’t have to forget the paypal commission we paid over almost 80% of the ebay-intakes.

You see, there was hardly 25% left over anymore. 200GBP in 2 months. What to do about ebay? Project director thinks ebay helps them build a reputation. Yeah, screw that. Indians or Canadians really don’t care about your local charity organization. Actually who does care about ‘who the ebay seller is’? If the feedback is positive you buy or am I wrong in that?
Interesting detail (warning geek stuff upcoming) is the fact that I made them a fully optimized osCommerce online shop months ago. The shop had only 1 (one!) incoming link, as they never started using the shop. We had put approx. 70 books online. Soon the shop had with only 1 (one!) incoming link a PageRank 5 (five!). Several books ranked higher than amazon.com and play.com at google. At MSN the shop was ranked higher than the national website of the organization. So I bring this option up again. We shortly discuss this.

Result? I was asked if I would mind to maintain the ebay shop. Yes the ebay shop! They can’t be bothered about the other shop. Now honestly I don’t mind, I get my own little office, my home server is already set up so I can remotely listen to my music and I am online non-stop. Nice volunteering.

Now if someone can explain me is written that because you’re running a charity you shouldn’t think business-orientated. Especially not if you have 3 management full-time position, 2 support workers and 1.5 full-time administrative workers (wages all togeter are almost 100.000GBP yearly).
Maybe I also should have added that the shop averages daily intakes of almost 1000GBP and that the organization still isn’t self-sufficient after almost 10 years.

See you tomorrow again, make sure I get a coffee machine in the my office as well. I’ll bring my own mug. Now go to tell this guy that both of us just seem to attract morons.