Posts Tagged ‘Money making’

Most of us go to school for, let say, at least 13 years. Not including a few more years of tertiary or higher education.  They teach us many things in school but not how to be financially smart.  We are trained from childhood, to go study, try to get good grades, come out of school and find a job and work all your  life for money that never seem to be enough. If you are lucky you will end up with some savings, to see you through your old age. If you are not you may find yourself one day old, sick, and broke.

I just finished reading the second book of the Rich dad, Poor dad series early last week. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too much to say that I believe that I have been taught about the importance of financial literacy in just a few weeks of reading those books than  16 years of formal education could ever provide me.  I just wish I could have read it sooner. But as they say, it is better late than never and for one of my age, perhaps it isn’t too late at all.

It is interesting that what ever information Kiyosaki had mentioned in his book isn’t something that you need a rocket scientist to come up with. It’s so simple that it is just so mind boggling that why we and I believe many of us never have thought about it before. That simple yet precious info is how to read a financial statement. Make a distinction of what is really and asset and what is a liability.

So next thing I’d like to read about are about all those investment ‘vehicles’, as the call it. Like investing on - gold coins & bullion, stocks, mutual funds, unit trusts, etc.  Just investing a little bit more of my time to educate myself on such subjects.

If you never heard of dropship before, it is actually a selling method where the retailer doesn’t hold neither handle any of the stock put up for sale. Customers buy and pays to the retailer, then the retailer would order from the dropshipper, and the dropshipper will prepare, pack and send directly to the customers without disclosing where the retailer got the products from.

For people who are interested to sell things online, but do not have the money to start or place to store all the stocks, you may want to look for a dropshipper. There are so many products to be sold, from cheap clothes, toys, vitamins, hand-made crafts, discount cigar, novelty items, etc.

Though it sounds easy, but it isn’t as easy as one would want to think. The challenge here is, to find an honest and reliable dropshipper and of course to sell the items. Well, the saying ‘no pain, no gain” isn’t there for nothing.

Since the time I bought my first item online (was it from Amazon or ebay?? hmm) I have always wanted to have my very own online store. Opening an online store does sound complicated for someone like me who doesn’t have much knowledge on website designing and such.

There is ebay or Amazon where you can open a small store with. But it comes with a small price of course. I have checked on how to start selling on ebay and also opening a store - special procedure and fees to open one - both requires a small fee to insert your product or items for sales on the market. You even have to pay for hard-disk space to store your products’ images. It is all rather complicated.

So I did a little research and search on how to open an online store. Lo and behold, I have found somewhat a jewel of a wordpress plugin. Yes, you can open an online store with a wordpress blog. All you need is to upload a plugin for you wordpress blog - Wordpress E-commerce plugin at Instinct.co.nz. Apparently the plugin has been around for sometime now, just didn’t find it months ago when I was looking for something like it.

I did a little experiment and I like it a lot! You can choose various form of payment method. Paypal and google checkout included. You can track your sales, and orders on the ’sales’ tab on your wordpress dashboard.

So far, I’ve only found one free wordpress theme that is compatible with the wp e-commerce plugin. Crafty cart theme. Here is what wp e-commerce store would look like with a ‘crafty cart’ theme - demo site.

I’m still learning and researching. Perhaps I will sell stuff on my own online store soon, or perhaps I will check out ebay first to get the feel of selling online then move on to own online store. Will see. Nevertheless it is still a good thing to learn about the cool plugin.