posted on August 13, 2001 06:33:12 PM new
I would really like to hire someone part-time to help out with my ebay business. I'm still debating whether to hire someone for bookwork, shipping or typing auctions. For those of you that have hired help, how do you pay? By the hour, by the piece, by a set job? Do they work in your home or in theirs? Did any one have concerns that your ideas/contacts would be taken and used to their advantage. Most of my "stuff" is purchased at one place and the stickers are left on until I ship. It would be very easy to duplicate what I do, which is a concern of mine. Any advice would help. Thanks.
posted on August 13, 2001 09:42:57 PM new
i am not sure if this economy on ebay will provide alot of ebayers with employees...i know in the heydays of ebay, alot paid by percentage; 20 % seemed to be the going rate then....this is now, and i don't run into alot of ebayers with employees.
as for me, i have had the same employee for almost 5 plus years on ebay. i pay her hourly. she has no desire to aspire to anything other than what she does....ie be very careful of training someone to take your business away from you.
as for her duties, she manages my shop, packages my ebay sales, measures items that i will list and does all the email inquiries....wow, she does alot....i pay her above minimum wage....and then the final clincher....i used to take her to estate sales as i felt she was 'ready' to help me find the stuff....this is very dangerous for someone you just don't trust, but i trust her......well, after packaging a million mccoy vases.....she couldn't spot one a million miles away.....i tried for 2 months to train her....and she just didn't get it....so i do the picking, listing, photoing....she works 5 days a week....but initially she was hired for 8 hrs a week....she slowing added hours to her schedule and now is a full time employee...i think also she is an exception rather than the rule....and i really feel if i had to do it again, i would pay someone a percentage...hope that helps
posted on August 13, 2001 10:24:12 PM new
I have 3 full time eBay employees ...one is on maternity leave right now
so Jack and my self have be doing some of the relisting
Do not let the person work at home.....This will only cause you stress.....all of our help is crossed trained for every
aspect, this way you never have to stop your operation at vacation or sick
time....any problems that come with an auction is brought to all the employees
attention so they all know what's going on with any one particular situation.
We do not pay a percentage of sales as wages.....Nothing but problems there
Every body starts at $10 an hour plus health care insurance...
I must tell you we have lost one staff member to the temptation of a the American
Dream of self employment......after she did the math......but this is a common
problem in any business....just remember two things and can weather any Storm
#1 Nobody does things the way that you would do it....
#2 If you have 2 or 200 employees you have one that’s the best and one that’s the worst..
Good luck
.
EBAY ID
JUMPIN*JACK
[ edited by jumpinjacko on Aug 13, 2001 10:25 PM ]
posted on August 14, 2001 01:47:30 AM new
Mrs Claus I expected that you would have a group of elves at your disposal.
We have 3 full time people working our business, me, my wife, one full time employee and one kid that helps out.
I have a kid that comes in a few times a week and puts stuff on shelves, dusts, breaks up boxes, hauls trash etc. doesn't sound like much but he really does work pretty hard when he is here and it saves me lots of time, I really miss him when he doesn't show up. Lots of times we trade out stuff for work, if not it's just minimum wage.
The full time employee we have usually manages to work only part time, that's ok right now it's summer and things are a bit slow in the summer, come winter we may need 3 or more this year. She checks the shelves, stocks and puts orders together, boxes, weighs, puts on postage, answers emails, and runs stuff to the post office sometimes is I'm busy.
my wife and I still do all the actual ordering, and entering of sales into quickbooks, we have 2 new dot coms that we just opened in addition to our first. Thanks eBay, if you hadn't pissed me off about the links to web pages I probably would have never really cared to develop our domains and the first is now making as much as our ebay business did last time this year which is double digits and I only have about 30-35% of our inventory in the store.
looking to the future I also have some info coming on group health insurance
posted on August 14, 2001 04:30:06 AM new
I contract out certain things, mostly with web developing, designing and product listing for my website. This has helped me free up time for other things. I'm still basically a one man show at this point and have enjoyed the challenge of making things more efficient, but I'm at the point also were I could really use a part-timer. I was wondering if anyone has tried using a temporary service, with the hope that if the person works out you can hire them outright.
Also before hiring some one talk to an accountant, to make sure you have all the forms,deudctions and tax requiremnts o.k. This is more of a problem in the over taxed Northeast.
posted on August 14, 2001 05:27:16 AM new
Finding someone to help is so difficult for me I generally would rather work the extra hours. Having had a small chain of retail stores at one time, and having spent more than ten years in retail, I can tell you every help story there is - from thieves, to alcoholics and druggies, to careless and lazy.
I also had an equal number of good employees in the process, but how to predict? My favorites were a woman painter in her 60's, a slightly retarded young man, and a smart but burned out middle-aged policeman! Age, gender and the like had little bearing on the results I found. I have found retired people with more energy than teenagers, and young folks with more common sense than workers with 25 years experience in retail.
Go figure.
The one rule I made with my ebay stuff is to not allow +++anyone+++ near my computer. Not no way. Not no how.
Hired a webmaster once to design some new templates and polish my system. Turned out to be a disaster as he reset all my controls, crashed the computer several times a day, and blamed it all on my equipment which was brand new. He also took forever to write one auction description, and poorly I might add. He was the weakest link so I said goodbye after two days of stress and aggravation. I wonder whose system he is screwing up today!
However I have a commitment from one of my best former employees to give me some time this fall and winter when activity peaks. My items don't produce very much profit individually, so I depend on volume for my success. He will pack and ship, and that will save almost half my time so it will really help.
posted on August 14, 2001 05:59:06 AM new
I have one part-time gal and she does most of my packing. I pay her by the hour. She works PT for me in my RL business, and has proven herself honest and dependable. Adding the ebay packing task just bumped up her weekly hours a bit.
Packing was never my favorite chore, but she loves it.
I have her pack up items as they receive bids, but leave the tops of the boxes open. Then, when payment comes in, I stick in a copy of the invoice. Depending on how busy I am or how many packages we're processing that day, either I or she will close up the boxes. I slap on the Endicia label and we're done.
This gal doesn't have a computer, doesn't want one, and has no "feel" for ebayable stuff. She mostly just shakes her head and giggles at the eBay sales she packs.
I really angsted about taking this step (and posted the same here on this board a while ago) but paying for the extra help has been a real step forward for my business.
posted on August 14, 2001 07:09:52 AM new
it is very hard to find good help ,a more feasible solution would be to bring in a partner.
someone you can get along with,complement your skills,bring in enough so he/she will work hard to make it work and not to lose what he/she have invested in.
how does one go about finding one?post an ad in local newspaper,art and craft shop??
or find a local ebay seller??
posted on August 14, 2001 09:18:42 AM new
true,it is easier to fire an employee,but ambitious employee will try to become your competitor,not all succeed i must say.
so why not work together,there is number in strength,you cannot grow unless you can sell more,you cannot sell more unless you have more help.
thats why i stress compatibility-it has to be somone who does not need to steal to pay for the basics or need every penny of the profit withdrawn to pay bills,someone who has stamina and can grow .
someone who has skills who complement what you have.
posted on August 14, 2001 12:07:20 PM new
I do the books for several small companies. If you hire someone on as an employee, and pay hourly rates, you're going to have to deal with payroll and the associated taxes. The companies I work for pay me as a business, thus saving them the pain of doing payroll on me. We usually do a monthly fee, and any extra incidentals get billed periodically. It really turns out being less of a headache than dealing with employees.
If you do go the employee route, I highly recommend outsourcing the payroll. There are a number of companies that do this, and are easy to work with. The fees they charge are well worth getting rid of the headache of manually doing payroll.
posted on August 14, 2001 12:33:09 PM new
My business has no employees. And I don't plan on hiring any until I can comfortable afford to pay above market wages (and market out here in California is much more than min wage).
In my former life, in Human resources, I have always experienced a correlation between the company's compensation schedule and the quality of employees.
Why?
Because when you pay more you can be more selective.
I most cases, top people demand top pay. Sometimes you luck up and get the one who is not really concerned with how much $$ they are making.
This is why retail (among other industries) is so problematic. They need to keep wages down to keep the margins. But the low wages mean they don't attract the best and so they have lots of problems and high turnover. It's a vicious cycle.
And petertdavis suggested considering paying the "helper" as a business. There are strict federal laws that govern determining whether a person is a contractor or an employee, so it's not as easy as it seems. While a bookkeeper or accountant is easily considered a contractor or consultant, someone packing and shipping (unless it is a fulfillment company) or taking photos (unless it is a professional photographer) would be hard to pass off as a contractor.
edited cor calrity
[ edited by MaterialGirl on Aug 14, 2001 12:35 PM ]
All of our negatives have been a direct result of all four of us not communicating very well (different buildings). That, and also ramping up to hundreds of auctions and over $10 000.00 by the second month of auctioning.
arttsupplies (webmaster)
edited for clarification on a couple of points.
[ edited by arttsupplies on Aug 14, 2001 01:03 PM ]
[ edited by arttsupplies on Aug 14, 2001 01:04 PM ]
posted on August 14, 2001 04:17:29 PM new
wranglers: Wow sounds like a great success with your .coms. I created my web site the week before Ebay banned the links. I am stuck on how to get it into the search engines. Do you really need to pay someone $100.00 a month to get a site to come up in the top 10?
posted on August 15, 2001 10:57:34 AM new
You need to have more than enough dollars and volume coming in to have an employee. Then you have OSHA and all the other governmental hangups as part of your business. I don't think eBay is that viable unless you are doing better than $5,000 a month.
The only reason to bring someone on is not to do the work, but to earn more money. An employee is not to be an expense but an income generator. Maybe you can do 5K each month. With an employee you should be able to do 10K or near that amount. If you can't, don't bother. What you do needs to be profitable--otherwise it isn't worth it.
posted on August 15, 2001 03:49:11 PM new
Mildreds, I was having the same problem, got my website up in Feb. and worked for months and months to get listed in the earch engines, when I did finally get in (with all the correct metatags) I was not even on page one, or two for that matter. I specialize in one area of vintage pottery, I have probably 6 main competitors. After so long of getting nowhere, I paid one major search engine $50 and bid on the keywords I wanted, I am now in the number 1 position for about 20 search engines, my traffic has more than tripled and sales are so good. Of course, it does help that my prices are at least half of what my competitors are. I used all the programs that promised top billing, none worked, and paid several other antique sites for banners and things. Nothing compares to what I have got going now. Lots of those sites also charge for the impression, not by the click. If you choose a site that charges you by the impression, you will run out of money quick. Heather
posted on August 15, 2001 05:06:12 PM new
I only have one helper. Hubby gets however many pots of coffee he goes through,and a can of cashews a day.Sometimes he gets two cookies if he works extra hard. He does my packing,makes boxes,prints shirts, and does all the Post Office runs.He also takes care of our incoming inventory like folding all the T-Shirts,filing transfers and putting up Videos and DVDs.Once a week I take him to McDonalds.
posted on August 16, 2001 08:51:58 AM new
I think it would be luverly to have someone pick up my packages, mail them, and bring back the receipt. Especially since I usually have to do all my mailing with two small quarrelsome kids in tow. I'm not big league enough to hire help, though.
I have the same kind of helper! He goes garage saling with me and holds my stuff while I shop, and if he's real good, he'll get a strawberry shortcake sundae on the way home (how cheap can you get???) If he helps me with packaging during the week, he gets homecooked meals (vs delivery pizza). Post office runs earn him clean laundry
[ edited by jumpinjacko on Aug 13, 2001 10:25 PM ]
