- Great Free Resources for Your Online Business -

Here are a few free resources that I found to be useful for selling on eBay and other online auction sites:

• The Postal Service! Surprisingly, its website (www.usps.com, not .gov, as one might expect) contains quite a few goodies, from online postage to custom forms in PDF format, and even free shipping boxes (if you use Priority Mail). The small boxes are great for sending lightweight items, such as bead jewelry, they are sturdy, can be dropped in a mailbox once postage has been affixed, and of course the price is hard to beat.
• Auction Shark (http://www.auctionshark.com/). If you sell on eBay, you probably already know how to look up completed auctions to get an idea of market prices for specific items. However, you can broaden your search by having Auction Shark searching (current) auctions on eBay, Amazon, Yahoo and Overstock auctions.
• Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com/). Need to improve the photos you took (see my entry on photographing bead jewelry below)? Irfanview is a nifty free program that contains many photo-editing functions.
• Scrolling gallery (http://www.isdntek.com/tagbot/xsell.htm). This freeware tool lets you enter your eBay auction numbers (or photo URLs) and descriptions on a website and then generates the code for a scrolling marquee that shows thumbnail pictures of your items. Just paste it into your About Me page on eBay or into your website, and presto!
• A free HTML editor. If you want to create a basic website, but are not too HTML-savvy, you might consider Netscape Composer, which is part of older versions of the free Netscape package (http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/download/archive.jsp). It has a simple interface, lets you create tables, insert photos, and more. This does not compare to high-end packages like Dreamweaver, but it will get a simple job done.
• An online thesaurus (http://www.m-w.com/). If you run out of words when writing your pithy, terse or loquacious auction description, take a look at this site. That might help you vary your descriptions a bit.

Until later.
Cyberbeader
http://www.lovebeadsunlimited.com