A short while back I was playing around with starting a home buisness when I decided to sell some model trains I had on Ebay.  When I put the trains online, I noticed there were many others selling the same trains I was selling.  With great interest I looked at these other sellers and began comparing how my items sold against their items.  

I have to admit, I was doing things on the cheap.  I put up only 3, maybe 4 pictures where others had 10 or 12.  A lot of the sellers had a buy now button, I didn’t.  Many had great feedback from customers, I had none to start with.

Most of the trains I sold as individual pieces.  As the weeks progressed I began to get feedback from customers and surprisingly, the prices I was selling at were often higher than other, seemingly more experienced sellers.  They certainly had more pictures and feedback than I did, yet I had higher bids.

When it was all over, I ended up with 100% positive feedback and a nice chunk of money.  The key to my succes was in the customer feedback.  Only a few things were important and believe it or not, price was not one of them.

Here is what the customers wanted.  The number one factor was that the item bought was as described in my online description.  I told them exactly what they were getting.  The second factor was that the items were packed beautifully and securely (thanks to my girlfriend).  Third was prompt delivery.  And the last item mentioned by many was that we were nice people to deal with.

Which just goes to show, even online, people want to deal with a personality and a nice one at that.  You can take that to the bank.

Technorati Tags: home business, online business, selling on ebay

TestFest is upon us once again. For those who don’t know, this is the time of year where User Groups and individuals donate a little of their time and effort to increasing the test coverage of PHP.

Hundreds of thousands of lines of code are working in concert to assemble one of the simplest to learn and fastest running scripting languages in the business. All this is achieved with the expectation that very few bugs will make it into releases and the ones that do will be stomped out quickly, efficiently and will never be heard from again. This is a lofty goal and is only possible through a system of tests designed to continuously evaluate the well-being of PHP.

This year the QA Team has been very busy implementing new features and improvements to make the TestFest experience easier and more enjoyable than ever before. Some these improvements include a Subversion repository for test storage and tracking, a Virtual Machine for simple test environment setup, and improved documentation of testing procedures.

2009 is looking to be the most successful TestFest event ever. Over 20 User Groups spanning Belgium, Brazil, Catalonia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, USA and the UK have already registered. This is an incredible response and we still have 2 months left to go.

Technorati Tags: TestFest is upon us once again.