In the coming weeks I will be redesigning all of the other sites in the WomensNet Family, so please keep an eye out for WomensNetOnline.com, DadsConnect.com, and WorkAtHomeIdeasForWomen.com

Now for the BIG announcement! The Amber Grant is BACK! We  are accepting applications for The Amber Grant through October 31st, 2008! If you have applied for a previous Amber Grant and did not win, you MUST resubmit your application.

Our primary focus is assisting women who are trying to start small businesses, home-based or online. This time the grant is for $500! Amber Grants are intended to be used to upgrade equipment, pay for a web site etc - the small but essential expenses that can often make the difference between getting started or being forever stalled.

No repayment is required or expected, although it is hoped that you will pass on the kindness by mentoring & helping others along the way.

To apply for an Amber Grant, head over to http://www.womensnet.net/Amber-Grants/apply.php

My husband and I have been EBay sellers for several years, with 3 stores through the EBay ‘partner’ company ProStores. This was actually our second attempt to make it work with ProStores - we wanted to use it because it offered more automation and frankly, when you have 10,000+ items listed on EBay - you NEED automation to manage things.

About 3 months ago, we sat down and really reviewed what was going on - the margins were getting eaten away by the increasing fees, and PayPal was also starting to hold funds for anything they suspected was a dropship item! This was bad as we sell mostly through dropshippers and many of them are our own very unique resources! But we have to pay for the products before they will be shipped - which mean that we would be paying much more than out the door than our profit was coming in!

Even retailers don’t normally pay for their products first - but PayPal - with no warning to anyone - had decided that it was going to enforce this new rule!

So, after almost 5 years on EBay - we made the decision to shut down our EBay stores and move on.

We have spent time looking and playing with a number of different store and shopping cart systems, and have settled on two: YahooStores, and Shopster.

The new Yahoo! Store, OurTeamShop.com is still ‘under construction’, but Yahoo! stores do seem to get indexed into the search engines quickly - obviously a great plus. The Yahoo! Store system is not the easiest to understand though - and adding ‘non-product’ pages, is quite honestly a real pain. I know that some very large companies use Yahoo! Stores, and we are using mainly because of the SEO and marketing features, but personally, I am going to let my husband fight with it - patience is NOT my strong suit! 

Shopster, on the other hand, is a pretty unique program, as it combines a true affiliate style program with a “you build it” store front system. A number of other dropshippers have tried similar programs (DOBA & Amazon, for example) but I haven’t seen one yet that offered this level of customization. 

You actually get to have your own domain name for your store, not a subdomain, which looks a lot better! You also get to not only pick the products you want - but you can also set your own prices! It interfaces with EBay, just in case you are brave enough to
want to continue selling there and they handle all of the shipping etc.

The Shopster system itself is so slick to use, we built a store with 11,000+ items in it in just a couple of days. If you are not a techie - this is definitely the system for you! The templates are pretty good, although I always want to tweak things, but really, you can use them just the way you are, and they still look pretty good.

Our Shopster store is I’m Your Number 1 Fan - and everything in the store is from their dropshipping program. The funny part is that they work with many of the same companies that we were working with before - but now, we don’t have to send in the orders, track the shipping etc - which means that we are probably saving about 3 hours a day of work time! Time that can now be spent marketing or building other stores or hey! Maybe we can do something non-work related! LOL - however we use the time - this is best possible way to outsource!

This is like finding your very own customized ‘private label’ affiliate program - sell under YOUR BRAND and YOUR WEBSITE - but let someone else do the ‘grunt’ work!

This is a real winner in our books!

Shopster. Sign up now for a 7 day free trial. No commitment, all the upside!

I have seen a number of complaints online about Shopster’s prices but after dealing with most of the same companies for the last 5 years, I can honestly tell you that when you factor in the EBay fees that we were paying before - we are at the same pricing or lower, with better profit margins, and less work.

I am sure that is isn’t that way on everything but it is for most of the lines that we carry, so we are feeling pretty good right now.

Of course, it also comes down to marketing - and the one thing that is not so good is that the item pages are not SEO optimized for the page titles, and we cannot add our own products. On a positive note - these are two changes that should be coming up soon.

We actually met with some of the ‘head honchos’ at a recent e-tailers conference in Chicago - and I have to say, we were impressed.

The store sill needs some design tweaking, but pop over and at least look around - my hubby did the store and he has very, very basic web skills - but I still think it came out pretty good!

The Number 1 Place For Team Apparel and Fan Gear for NCAA, NFL, NHL, MLB, NBA, & NASCAR! 

I will be the first to admit that when the sun comes out I don’t want to be sitting indoors on the phone or the computer. The great outdoors beckons and the pool calls loudest of all! My natural inclination would be to chuck it all and ‘make hay while the sun shines’ but…from a monetary perspective that is not always practical!

Thanks to the wireless age, though, I can handle most of my calls from outside, and even handle a lot of the daily email communications from my laptop, although I admit that I do have to sit under the umbrella to do this.
Hey - it’s tough - but we make sacrifices right?

There was also a time though, when you would never have admitted to your clients that you worked from home, and often went to some pretty silly extremes to hide the fact. Now, though, it’s almost a badge of honor, and on more than one occasion, I have actually told a client that I was conducting the call from pool side - and frequently discovered that they were sitting by their pool as well!

Times have changed and it’s made being a home based entrepreneur acceptable, and even enviable. With all of the technology available today, there is little need for offsite locations, or staff. Virtual assistants can help with the paperwork, automated phone services can answer and even route your calls to you where ever you are, and online fax services are much cheaper than buying an expensive (and short-lived!) ‘all-in-one’ printer. (Don’t get me started on those monsters - we do NOT get along!)

I will admit though that I tend to start my day earlier and work a little later at night in the summer so that I can take off hours during the sunny time - and that’s the best part about my online business. I don’t watch much TV anyway, and I would rather bike or run or play tennis while the weather is nice, so I just swap out the off time according to the seasons.

So, what do you do in the summer? How does your work schedule change or does it?

Over the last several weeks, several VERY disturbing changes have taken place at EBay as EBay seems intent on wiping out the very business base that built the behemoth, to focus on the corporate clientele that have taken a much larger position on EBay over the past couple of years, using EBay to sell off their excess inventory directly, rather than selling to the large discount chains as was the previous habit.

Here’s an overview of some of the most significant - and damaging - changes that affect you and I, the folks that have built home businesses around EBay….

1) The EBay Feedback system now only allows Sellers to leave POSITIVE for Buyers. On the other hand, Buyers can leave any kind of feedback they want for Sellers. This means that if you have a problem with a Buyer (gee - that never happens, right?) you are pretty much out of luck! So, if the Buyer feels that he should have received his widget in 3 working days - even though you clearly state that it takes no less than 10 working days for the widget to ship - he can give you a negative! And you are pretty much powerless since there is no arbitration system in place.

2) Neutral Feedback? HAH!! Guess what? They no longer exist! All of your neutral comments have now been converted to NEGATIVE feedback ratings. Top PowerSellers have lost their PowerSeller status and the perks that went along with it - including the extra discounts that were often factored into their pricing. Although the PowerSellers were given a period of time to ‘correct’ the situation - the bottom line is that Buyers are not terribly responsive to such requests - and this means that a huge percentage of PowerSellers…aren’t. An interesting side note here is that one PowerSeller that was hit by these changes…..is also one of the speakers at this week’s EBay Live Conference in Chicago……should be a very interesting speech…….

3) The Final Straw…….dropshipping is huge on EBay. My hubby has been very successful dropshipping on EBay - both through EBay partners such as Doba and others, as well as resources of his own, through his 25 years in the wholesale gift industry. Today he received an email from PayPal stating that any orders that were ‘known to be dropshipping” would result in a 21 day hold on the funds from the customer! The only way around this is to send PayPal the tracking notice when the product ships and supposedly they will ‘release’ your funds.

Personally - I have dealt with PayPal in the past over disputes - and the response times are horrible. Basically, this means that if you have been earning a living dropshipping - you will now have to be financially solvent enough to cover all of your sales out of your own pocket, rather than paying for the product with the funds from PayPal. This pretty much will kill the entire dropshipping business model for most people on EBay.

4) No digital products - Ebooks were a HUGE seller on EBay and it was a great business model! Automated download, a real ’set it and forget it’ business model if handled correctly. But apparently it was not handled correctly by many and now ebooks and other digital items must be sold in DVD format and physically shipped.exactly why it was such a great business - you didn’t have to ship anything!

At one point, we had 4 stores on EBay and thousands of products, but we have been ‘branching out’ and are looking at other products, such as the EBay Affiliate program, niche store scripts etc.

After this latest round of changes, and the notice today from PayPal, we will be pulling 99% of our products off EBay.

As a home business - it no longer works for us.

Over the next few days we will be posting reviews of the various store models as we take them for a test drive - we will bring the pros and cons of every system!!