Help Me Launch A Truly Remarkable Stamp Website
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A remarkable stamp website
Ever since I discovered stamp collecting as a little boy I was captivated by their magic. Every single thing that we as humans think is worth preserving, worth celebrating and that we value is honoured on postage stamps. These stamps are designed by artists and talented individuals from around the world and serve as living time capsules of humanity. To collect and study postage stamps is to study humanity. Most of what I know about the world either came from a stamp, or the curiosity to look it up (back then we only had encyclopedias) came from something I saw on a stamp.
I knew that I wanted to share the magic of stamps and all my knowledge about them with the world when I grew up. I knew that at 7 years of age, 40 years ago. But back then the barriers to entry in the business of selling stamps to collectors were so high: one needed a lot of money to build a stock and to advertise it in print. There was just no way to start a stamp business back then.
So, like most responsible young adults at that time, I went to university and from there I pursued a career in public accounting - a career that I excelled in, making it to partner in a Toronto accounting firm.
In between the time that I first became aware of my desire to become a stamp dealer and making partner, I had several stints in which I worked professionally in the trade. Between 17 and 19, I worked full time for Weeda Stamps Ltd., in Vancouver, BC. Later, I also worked briefly for F.E. Eaton and Sons as an auction assistant. It soon became clear that neither job was ever going to lead to a career in this field, so I left and returned to university. I completed my degree and started my career in public accounting in 1994.
About 6 years in, I started to become disillusioned with my career. I wanted to return to the trade, and so I took a job with Eastern Auctions in Bathurst, NB. I had a troubled relationship with my employer because my ideas did not coincide with his. Despite working extremely hard for this company, the opportunity ended in late 2004, and I would up moving my family to Toronto and returning to public accounting. I worked my way back up and made partner in 2012.
At the end of 2012 I went through a devastating divorce that killed all my desire to stay in public accounting. I wanted to return to my love, which is researching and writing about stamps, for the benefit of all collectors, as well as serving all collectors. So, for the next three years, I concentrated on taking all my money and buying stock, as well as carefully working on a business plan and obtaining financing to start my business. I left my position as partner in July 2015 to start my business.
I had thought that the best way to build my business was on E-bay. My reasoning was that they have the infrastructure and marketing clout to get my stamps in front of collectors that want them. For my writings I had decided to publish my blog articles on blogger. So I began the long and grueling process of listing my stamps on E-bay - hundreds of thousands of them, and writing blog posts. I knew that it would take time to gain the trust of my customers and build loyalty, but I felt that paying E-bay over $500 a month would mean that they would help me build my business and have my back. I was wrong. Dead wrong. I couldn't have been more wrong about anything in my life if I tried.
At first things went ok. I spent 18 hour days working from 8 am until 2 am, 5 days a week, doing nothing but list stamps on E-bay's cumbersome interface and writing one day a week. If I was lucky, I could list just over 100 items a day. I had minimal interference from E-bay, saw my sales slowly grow and was encouraged by what I saw.
By July 2016 the problems began. E-bay announced that they were eliminating USD currency for Canadian sellers and I would have to re-list all of my listings in CDN. I had no problem with this and was all set to tell them that they could just change my prices to CDN, dollar for dollar. But that wasn't possible. They came out with a clunky editing tool that required me to essentially re-do the 4,600 listings that I had at the time. It put me out of commission for an entire month and my sales fell drastically because I couldn't list anything new at that point.
By October 2016 most of my savings had run out because my E-bay sales never grew to the projected levels. I responded to this by moving to Saint John, NB, where the cost of living is much lower, and I resumed my listing activity, eventually getting to over 9,000 listings on E-bay. I found it difficult though because I really needed to be able to hire help. But I could never get my sales past a certain point, no matter how much I listed, so I never had enough cash flow to hire.
I started investigating and I discovered many seller forums where long-time sellers on E-bay talked about E-bay using algorithms to limit the amount of exposure that sellers' items had on their platform and thereby limit sellers' sales to within just a few hundred dollars of a pre-determined and secret monthly limit. I called E-bay to enquire about this and was assured numerous times that this was false. So, I tried not to worry too much about it and kept working hard, working from 8am-12 am most nights.
But then, early in 2018 I started to notice a very sharp drop in my sales growth. I noticed that if I did not list new material every single week that my sales would drop, even though I had over $375,000 worth of stock listed. I didn't have time to just list. I needed to do other things like market and build my customer base. But E-bay's algorithms seemed to be designed to force me to spend all my time working in my business and to deny me the opportunity to work on my business.
As an accountant I am trained to analyze numeric patterns. I can usually tell when a set of numbers has been manipulated versus a set that displays normal, random variation. It is difficult to explain how I know this, but it comes from dealing with many, many situations where financial statements have been manipulated to deceive the government primarily, but also investors and banks. So, I went about investigating what was going on, because I wanted to know that all of my investment was not for naught.
So, I began to look at my sales patterns and what I noticed, mixed in with the smooth, but managed growth was an unmistakable pattern: every single time I had a good day of sales, or maybe two days, my sales for the next week would fall, so that my total sales for that week would never exceed a certain amount. This was true whether I listed more, or did nothing. If I did nothing sales simply fell. If I had a day with all new customers, then I would have almost no repeat business that day. If I week of mostly regular customers, then I would have no new ones. Some of my stamps that I had 5 of in stock would not move at all for 3 years, but then I would get one sale and within the week the other 4 would mysteriously sell, all to different people.
This happened often enough that I began to realize that what I had heard earlier was true: E-bay controls the businesses of its sellers, period. They don't want sellers to be successful, because then, those sellers could leave and take their customers with them, or so they think. What they want, is for sellers to be so dependent on them that they cannot leave. That is not a business. That is a job that has no salary, or benefits, that I have had to go into debt to get. It is less than worthless. I knew I had to get out, not just because my sales were not growing, but also because there was no way for me to share all of my knowledge about stamps with the world at large, on E-bay. Plus, I had no way of know what other wholesale changes E-bay would make without warning. But I later found out that E-bay is going to start taking over the payments process, so that sellers no longer have direct access to their cash flow. When I found that out, I knew it was time to get out of Dodge.
So, in February 2018 I had over 1,500 brochures printed and I began to inform my customers that I would be building my own website and leaving E-bay by the end of the year. I began to build a website with an outfit in Southern California that I had worked with on E-bay. They produced a tool that I used for doing E-bay listings that I found useful. So I figured that their E-commerce solution would be good too. The interface and layout seemed dated to me, but I wasn't too concerned because I was so anxious to get something that I could show my customers and could get away from E-bay, you know? I worked on this for almost 6 months and had all kinds of problems. I was only able to migrate about 1,000 or so of my listings over and I had to edit them all. But then in late July I began to notice that the website was horribly slow - it took as long as 10 seconds for the site to register mouse clicks. My heart sank, as I realized that there was no way that anybody was going to visit this site with it being like this, especially when it was not even optimized for mobile.
I tired to get support to address the issue, but was told there was nothing that could be done. So, I scrapped it and started again with Shopify. For three months I have worked tirelessly to produce a truly amazing website. I have been able to combine 325 blog posts with all my e-bay listings and over 40 pages of general stamp knowledge into one website. It is essentially my life's work and what is there now is only 5-10% of what I know. It is the type of website that every stamp collector from around the world should see even if they never plan to buy from it. It is in 15 languages, so that it can truly serve a very large proportion of the world's collectors. It is still has a few edits that need to be done, but it is 95% perfect.
But, I have a huge problem. I'm broke.
I've spent all the money I started with long ago. I have almost 900K worth of inventory, but no time to list it. I have borrowed all the money I can when I still thought that E-bay was viable. My plan was to pay it back as my sales grew. But thanks to their sneaky manipulations, that never happened. So, for the past year, I have been trying to keep the business afloat, while E-bay keeps cutting my sales back every month. I've done pretty well in the summer, as I could earn some money from our bed and breakfast, and I have now taken on some part time accounting work to fill in the gaps.
The worst part is that I can see that I am finally beginning to gain some traction: I have had two significant orders from specialist collectors of Nigeria in the UK, and my first international Facebook marketing campaign looks promising. The chief editor of Linn's magazine - the largest stamp publication in the US has asked me if I am interested in writing a regular Canada column. This would give me a lot more exposure. So, it seems fairly clear to me that the potential is there: I have a world class website, I have the inventory to sell and I am finally beginning to gain some traffic.
But what is clear to me too is that building this into a viable business is not going to be quick. For one thing, I've discovered that I cannot count on my E-bay customers to buy from my website. They are used to buying on E-bay, and so I am really having to start all over again, and that realization is just heartbreaking. For $70 this week Facebook allowed me to reach 45,000 of the 5.6 million stamp collectors that they say are active on their platform. So, it is clear that if I even want to have a chance to really reach a significant proportion of these people and show them the site, I need to spend more money, and I don't have it.
At this point, you may be wondering why this is so important to me. The reason is because it is my gift. We all have a gift, and this is my gift. You see, I am autistic. I have had this invisible condition that I didn't even have a name for back in 1985 when I was in high school and couldn't understand why my classmates had girlfriends and I didn't. I have an extraordinary memory and ability to absorb knowledge about the world's stamps and to take that knowledge and disseminate it to the world. All I have ever wanted to do, is something meaningful with my life that would make a difference to other people. With accounting, I always felt that I could be abducted by aliens and it wouldn't matter - somebody else would do it. I don't give a damn about money. I care about being able to do something worthwhile with the rest of my life, and I know that if I don't continue to build this website, write about stamps and promote the hobby that nobody else will. I know that sounds dramatic, but the internet has been around for almost 30 years now and there are no other sites like mine. None that I know of. So, this is why I say what I do.
The money I am seeking will likely not be enough to completely see me through, but it will help me get through the winter until things pick up with the bed and breakfast again in the summer. I will use it to increase my advertising budget and to keep the lights on while I focus on promoting the website. I am hopeful that if I can get the traffic up with a larger Canadian advertising budget, that I will be able to finally start paying down my debt and maybe even hiring someone to help me list all this inventory. What it will also allow me to do is finally tell E-bay to get lost, and close my account, stopping the $500-$600 per month hemorrhage that this represents.
I am only doing this now because I am out of options. I am not normally the type of man who looks for a handout. In fact, I don't think I've ever asked anyone for a handout. Ever. I've tried getting part time work and although I have succeeded, I know it won't be enough. My only other option is to go back to work full time, which I am actually considering. I don't actually know if there are any full time jobs in my field here in Saint John. But if I do that, all the momentum I have worked hard to build to this point, will disappear, and I will be letting down my investors and my consignors, who have trusted me to help them sell their stamps.
I wish I had known what a rotten, evil corporation E-bay was and is. If I had, I never would have started my business with them. I would have waited longer, saved more money and started with Shopify, right out of the gate. But I didn't do that. And now, I have just enough money to last another month or two.
If you choose to help you will be supporting a lifelong dream and allowing me to preserve my life's work. Other philatelists from around the world will be able to access my work and the hobby will be richer for it. This was never about money for me. It was, and is always about my desire to preserve and promote a fantastic hobby that has saved my life more than once. If it could save my life, then it almost certainly will save someone else's too. I will be forever in your debt if you choose to help.
Thank you for reading and listening.
Ever since I discovered stamp collecting as a little boy I was captivated by their magic. Every single thing that we as humans think is worth preserving, worth celebrating and that we value is honoured on postage stamps. These stamps are designed by artists and talented individuals from around the world and serve as living time capsules of humanity. To collect and study postage stamps is to study humanity. Most of what I know about the world either came from a stamp, or the curiosity to look it up (back then we only had encyclopedias) came from something I saw on a stamp.
I knew that I wanted to share the magic of stamps and all my knowledge about them with the world when I grew up. I knew that at 7 years of age, 40 years ago. But back then the barriers to entry in the business of selling stamps to collectors were so high: one needed a lot of money to build a stock and to advertise it in print. There was just no way to start a stamp business back then.
So, like most responsible young adults at that time, I went to university and from there I pursued a career in public accounting - a career that I excelled in, making it to partner in a Toronto accounting firm.
In between the time that I first became aware of my desire to become a stamp dealer and making partner, I had several stints in which I worked professionally in the trade. Between 17 and 19, I worked full time for Weeda Stamps Ltd., in Vancouver, BC. Later, I also worked briefly for F.E. Eaton and Sons as an auction assistant. It soon became clear that neither job was ever going to lead to a career in this field, so I left and returned to university. I completed my degree and started my career in public accounting in 1994.
About 6 years in, I started to become disillusioned with my career. I wanted to return to the trade, and so I took a job with Eastern Auctions in Bathurst, NB. I had a troubled relationship with my employer because my ideas did not coincide with his. Despite working extremely hard for this company, the opportunity ended in late 2004, and I would up moving my family to Toronto and returning to public accounting. I worked my way back up and made partner in 2012.
At the end of 2012 I went through a devastating divorce that killed all my desire to stay in public accounting. I wanted to return to my love, which is researching and writing about stamps, for the benefit of all collectors, as well as serving all collectors. So, for the next three years, I concentrated on taking all my money and buying stock, as well as carefully working on a business plan and obtaining financing to start my business. I left my position as partner in July 2015 to start my business.
I had thought that the best way to build my business was on E-bay. My reasoning was that they have the infrastructure and marketing clout to get my stamps in front of collectors that want them. For my writings I had decided to publish my blog articles on blogger. So I began the long and grueling process of listing my stamps on E-bay - hundreds of thousands of them, and writing blog posts. I knew that it would take time to gain the trust of my customers and build loyalty, but I felt that paying E-bay over $500 a month would mean that they would help me build my business and have my back. I was wrong. Dead wrong. I couldn't have been more wrong about anything in my life if I tried.
At first things went ok. I spent 18 hour days working from 8 am until 2 am, 5 days a week, doing nothing but list stamps on E-bay's cumbersome interface and writing one day a week. If I was lucky, I could list just over 100 items a day. I had minimal interference from E-bay, saw my sales slowly grow and was encouraged by what I saw.
By July 2016 the problems began. E-bay announced that they were eliminating USD currency for Canadian sellers and I would have to re-list all of my listings in CDN. I had no problem with this and was all set to tell them that they could just change my prices to CDN, dollar for dollar. But that wasn't possible. They came out with a clunky editing tool that required me to essentially re-do the 4,600 listings that I had at the time. It put me out of commission for an entire month and my sales fell drastically because I couldn't list anything new at that point.
By October 2016 most of my savings had run out because my E-bay sales never grew to the projected levels. I responded to this by moving to Saint John, NB, where the cost of living is much lower, and I resumed my listing activity, eventually getting to over 9,000 listings on E-bay. I found it difficult though because I really needed to be able to hire help. But I could never get my sales past a certain point, no matter how much I listed, so I never had enough cash flow to hire.
I started investigating and I discovered many seller forums where long-time sellers on E-bay talked about E-bay using algorithms to limit the amount of exposure that sellers' items had on their platform and thereby limit sellers' sales to within just a few hundred dollars of a pre-determined and secret monthly limit. I called E-bay to enquire about this and was assured numerous times that this was false. So, I tried not to worry too much about it and kept working hard, working from 8am-12 am most nights.
But then, early in 2018 I started to notice a very sharp drop in my sales growth. I noticed that if I did not list new material every single week that my sales would drop, even though I had over $375,000 worth of stock listed. I didn't have time to just list. I needed to do other things like market and build my customer base. But E-bay's algorithms seemed to be designed to force me to spend all my time working in my business and to deny me the opportunity to work on my business.
As an accountant I am trained to analyze numeric patterns. I can usually tell when a set of numbers has been manipulated versus a set that displays normal, random variation. It is difficult to explain how I know this, but it comes from dealing with many, many situations where financial statements have been manipulated to deceive the government primarily, but also investors and banks. So, I went about investigating what was going on, because I wanted to know that all of my investment was not for naught.
So, I began to look at my sales patterns and what I noticed, mixed in with the smooth, but managed growth was an unmistakable pattern: every single time I had a good day of sales, or maybe two days, my sales for the next week would fall, so that my total sales for that week would never exceed a certain amount. This was true whether I listed more, or did nothing. If I did nothing sales simply fell. If I had a day with all new customers, then I would have almost no repeat business that day. If I week of mostly regular customers, then I would have no new ones. Some of my stamps that I had 5 of in stock would not move at all for 3 years, but then I would get one sale and within the week the other 4 would mysteriously sell, all to different people.
This happened often enough that I began to realize that what I had heard earlier was true: E-bay controls the businesses of its sellers, period. They don't want sellers to be successful, because then, those sellers could leave and take their customers with them, or so they think. What they want, is for sellers to be so dependent on them that they cannot leave. That is not a business. That is a job that has no salary, or benefits, that I have had to go into debt to get. It is less than worthless. I knew I had to get out, not just because my sales were not growing, but also because there was no way for me to share all of my knowledge about stamps with the world at large, on E-bay. Plus, I had no way of know what other wholesale changes E-bay would make without warning. But I later found out that E-bay is going to start taking over the payments process, so that sellers no longer have direct access to their cash flow. When I found that out, I knew it was time to get out of Dodge.
So, in February 2018 I had over 1,500 brochures printed and I began to inform my customers that I would be building my own website and leaving E-bay by the end of the year. I began to build a website with an outfit in Southern California that I had worked with on E-bay. They produced a tool that I used for doing E-bay listings that I found useful. So I figured that their E-commerce solution would be good too. The interface and layout seemed dated to me, but I wasn't too concerned because I was so anxious to get something that I could show my customers and could get away from E-bay, you know? I worked on this for almost 6 months and had all kinds of problems. I was only able to migrate about 1,000 or so of my listings over and I had to edit them all. But then in late July I began to notice that the website was horribly slow - it took as long as 10 seconds for the site to register mouse clicks. My heart sank, as I realized that there was no way that anybody was going to visit this site with it being like this, especially when it was not even optimized for mobile.
I tired to get support to address the issue, but was told there was nothing that could be done. So, I scrapped it and started again with Shopify. For three months I have worked tirelessly to produce a truly amazing website. I have been able to combine 325 blog posts with all my e-bay listings and over 40 pages of general stamp knowledge into one website. It is essentially my life's work and what is there now is only 5-10% of what I know. It is the type of website that every stamp collector from around the world should see even if they never plan to buy from it. It is in 15 languages, so that it can truly serve a very large proportion of the world's collectors. It is still has a few edits that need to be done, but it is 95% perfect.
But, I have a huge problem. I'm broke.
I've spent all the money I started with long ago. I have almost 900K worth of inventory, but no time to list it. I have borrowed all the money I can when I still thought that E-bay was viable. My plan was to pay it back as my sales grew. But thanks to their sneaky manipulations, that never happened. So, for the past year, I have been trying to keep the business afloat, while E-bay keeps cutting my sales back every month. I've done pretty well in the summer, as I could earn some money from our bed and breakfast, and I have now taken on some part time accounting work to fill in the gaps.
The worst part is that I can see that I am finally beginning to gain some traction: I have had two significant orders from specialist collectors of Nigeria in the UK, and my first international Facebook marketing campaign looks promising. The chief editor of Linn's magazine - the largest stamp publication in the US has asked me if I am interested in writing a regular Canada column. This would give me a lot more exposure. So, it seems fairly clear to me that the potential is there: I have a world class website, I have the inventory to sell and I am finally beginning to gain some traffic.
But what is clear to me too is that building this into a viable business is not going to be quick. For one thing, I've discovered that I cannot count on my E-bay customers to buy from my website. They are used to buying on E-bay, and so I am really having to start all over again, and that realization is just heartbreaking. For $70 this week Facebook allowed me to reach 45,000 of the 5.6 million stamp collectors that they say are active on their platform. So, it is clear that if I even want to have a chance to really reach a significant proportion of these people and show them the site, I need to spend more money, and I don't have it.
At this point, you may be wondering why this is so important to me. The reason is because it is my gift. We all have a gift, and this is my gift. You see, I am autistic. I have had this invisible condition that I didn't even have a name for back in 1985 when I was in high school and couldn't understand why my classmates had girlfriends and I didn't. I have an extraordinary memory and ability to absorb knowledge about the world's stamps and to take that knowledge and disseminate it to the world. All I have ever wanted to do, is something meaningful with my life that would make a difference to other people. With accounting, I always felt that I could be abducted by aliens and it wouldn't matter - somebody else would do it. I don't give a damn about money. I care about being able to do something worthwhile with the rest of my life, and I know that if I don't continue to build this website, write about stamps and promote the hobby that nobody else will. I know that sounds dramatic, but the internet has been around for almost 30 years now and there are no other sites like mine. None that I know of. So, this is why I say what I do.
The money I am seeking will likely not be enough to completely see me through, but it will help me get through the winter until things pick up with the bed and breakfast again in the summer. I will use it to increase my advertising budget and to keep the lights on while I focus on promoting the website. I am hopeful that if I can get the traffic up with a larger Canadian advertising budget, that I will be able to finally start paying down my debt and maybe even hiring someone to help me list all this inventory. What it will also allow me to do is finally tell E-bay to get lost, and close my account, stopping the $500-$600 per month hemorrhage that this represents.
I am only doing this now because I am out of options. I am not normally the type of man who looks for a handout. In fact, I don't think I've ever asked anyone for a handout. Ever. I've tried getting part time work and although I have succeeded, I know it won't be enough. My only other option is to go back to work full time, which I am actually considering. I don't actually know if there are any full time jobs in my field here in Saint John. But if I do that, all the momentum I have worked hard to build to this point, will disappear, and I will be letting down my investors and my consignors, who have trusted me to help them sell their stamps.
I wish I had known what a rotten, evil corporation E-bay was and is. If I had, I never would have started my business with them. I would have waited longer, saved more money and started with Shopify, right out of the gate. But I didn't do that. And now, I have just enough money to last another month or two.
If you choose to help you will be supporting a lifelong dream and allowing me to preserve my life's work. Other philatelists from around the world will be able to access my work and the hobby will be richer for it. This was never about money for me. It was, and is always about my desire to preserve and promote a fantastic hobby that has saved my life more than once. If it could save my life, then it almost certainly will save someone else's too. I will be forever in your debt if you choose to help.
Thank you for reading and listening.
Organiser
Chris McFetridge
Organiser
Saint John, NB