Our initial business model was to use eBay to sell our wares. Advantages: Ebay takes care of all the marketing, it is really easy to use, and the audience is worldwide. Disadvantages: eBay has lots of rules about content you can include, negative feedback from jerks is inevitable but still disappointing, and the fees take about 8% of our profit.

On the first day of our second year we opened a Yahoo store as another venue to sell our wares. Yahoo store Advantages: Includes some marketing, is relatively easy to use, fees less than eBay, and the content is virtually unmonitored. Yahoo store Disadvantages: Still has fees, not all that easy to customize.

Traffic to our yahoo store has been steady but most people still purchase through ebay. To entice our customers to the yahoo store, we recently reduced all prices by 5% on the yahoo store only. The next step will be to use advertising to directly pull traffic into the yahoo store.