If you wanted to 10x your average listing’s price on eBay without changing your inventory, what would you have to change to get sales? This question is what led me to automate the lot listings with scans and now my average listing’s sale price is $39.55 instead of $1.99.
What would I have to do to 10x it again?
The answer to this important question lies in knowing your ideal customers, what they want, and what options exist for them in the market. This knowledge allows us sellers to identify (or create) competitive advantages.
Competitive advantages are the things that make us different and/or better than the competition in the market. They can be internal or external. My lot listing automation is an internal competitive advantage (and so is my incoming card processing system, how I source, etc.). These internal CAs translate into external CAs: higher search visibility (with ~100 listings, I still get ~60% of the impressions I got with 100,000 listings) and a better customer experience for people browsing my listings compared to typical lot listings.
When my webapp is live, pretty much anyone will have access to this advantage and the CA will weaken. This is just like how the advantage of using CDP/Kronocard is weakened by each new user they get. So the other important question to always keep in mind is this: if someone copies everything I do and uses the same tools, what can I do to leapfrog them anyways?
What could I do to delight customers if I had an infinite budget? Is there a way to do it, or some of it, on a realistic budget?
What threatens to kill my business and how can I kill it myself? Kodak could have killed film with their own digital camera (they invented the first one). Instead, they let another company kill film and never recovered.
What are unsolved problems and common customer complaints in the industry? What would solve them? How can I incorporate that into what I’m doing.
Anyone can push the buttons, buy the subscriptions, and follow the guides. But almost nobody is innovating competitive advantages in this industry.
