FamilyEbiz

This passage contains a wealth of information necessary for the business owner and everyone else as well. First, God is commanding us to know what we have. That may seem pretty basic, but most businessmen (and families!) that I have met have no idea what their true financial situation looks like. They may know how much they make in a given year, but they have no idea how much of that was profit, how much was overhead or how much of the take-home pay their family spent and what they spent it on! Knowing the state of your flocks is the first step to getting more flocks! And keeping more flock (this flock/flocks thing is killing me!) is almost the same as getting more flock. What do I mean? Well, if I promise to build you a house for $100,000 and I know that my lumber costs will be $50,000, then I can create more profit for myself by shopping around and buying the same quality of lumber for $45,000. I have just given myself a $5000 raise and I did not have to sell a new house to do it. If I save $5000 on 2 houses, I have just made the entire profit of building another house without the hassle and liability of that third house.

Now, that is a very simplistic example, but you get the idea. By reducing your expenses, you can give yourself and your family a raise this year. And if you use that money to pay an extra payment on your mortgage (applied to the principal), you have probably tripled the value of that money! With the stock market returns what they are this year, you would be better off paying down your mortgage than investing extra money in a mutual fund. Don’t get me wrong…I am not against mutual funds. But a return on an investment runs in both directions. Trying to fill a bicycle tire that has a small leak can be an exasperating job. Two days later, you are right back where you started. Fix the leak and then you can really make some headway. This biblical passage above has so much meat that we will develop it over the next few newsletters, so on to the practical tip.

Practica:

If you have read the previous tips, you know about domain sites, hosting, web pages and finding products to sell. If you use the products on Click Bank (for my past newsletter on ClickBank, click here), they are electronic products that do not involve shipping and ClickBank takes care of the order for you. But some of you (myself included) sell actual products. These are not gnostic products that only exist in the ethereal realm, rather, these are real products that you can hold in your hand in good old merry middle earth (sorry, I was lapsing into C.S. Lewis mode). How do we get people to buy our stuff and more importantly, how do we get them to buy more of our stuff?

Well, think about human nature for a moment. We are basically lazy creatures. We not only want to shop for items from the comfort of our own home, we also want the experience to be as easy and fast as possible. Well, shopping carts to the rescue. As you know we have a homeschool curriculum store and we sell a lot of stuff online. We had an order page, but you had to cut and paste from our web page to the order page and that was cumbersome. Add to the fact that our order page seemed to always be going down and any fool could see that we had a problem. We were losing sales that we did not even know we were losing. How did I know we were losing sales? Well, as soon as I started using a shopping cart, online sales immediately increased. Now, all a customer has to do is wander onto our site, see something they like (which on our site is soooo easy to do!) and then click on the buy it! button. The cart takes them to a page that gets their shipping information and credit card and then, emails the order to me. I go to the shopping cart’s secure website and get all the necessary information and then send the goods.

Sound easy? It is, but there are many shopping carts out there and many are fairly expensive. Most charge a monthly fee and depending on how much you sell, it may not be worth it. Being the cheap… uhm, frugal man that I am, I found a free shopping cart that is pretty powerful. It is called Mal’s e-commerce (http://www.mals-e.com/) and it works like this. You sign up for a free shopping cart account and they give you a special account number. They also give you sample code for your website. So, you code your buy it! button (which is actually a link to their shopping cart) with your product information, price and return page (so that customers can return to your site) and place the buy it! button next to your product on your web page. You can even determine how much to charge for shipping and other things on the admin page.

One of the drawbacks to this particular shopping cart is that you have to create a buy it! button for each product you sell. If you sell thousands of products (like I do on my website), it can be a pain making all those buy it! buttons, but did I mention it was free? The more expensive shopping carts have a database that allows you to enter all your products once and make changes to the price in the database instead of going to each buy it! button and making the changes there. But you also save $50-$100 a month and that can really add up.

So, make the buying process easier and faster for your customers and they will buy more of your stuff and then later you can afford one of those fancy shopping carts.

Warmly in Christ,

Stephen Beck
www.familyebiz.com
www.curriculumconnection.net
email: steve@familyebiz.com

Click here for Tip #8