Make Google Your Friend

If you don't use Google by now beyond their search engine, you may be a little behind in what they can provide:

Google Base Store Connector: Synchronize your ebay store listings with Google Base (think craig's list) and get your ebay listings in their search more prominently.

Picasa: Google's free picture software program. It's so easy to use from uploading to cropping to organizing all of your photos (and videos) on your computer. They have this great button to help improve any photo you upload from your digital camera: "I'm Feeling Lucky."

Gmail: I've been using it for a few years. This helps you organize your emails in your inbox related to ebay for transactions by creating labels. I use terms such as payment pending, payment mailed, paid, priority mail, international, and (sparingly) refund. You can put these labels in different colors and different shading behind the font to make them stand out. Gmail just added tasks to their email so you can create an easy to-do list for your etopps auctions. Very easy to use and freakin' free.

iGoogle: with you Gmail account, you get to have a dashboard similar to My Yahoo in which you control which content appears on this page. You can include blog feeds (like this one ; ), the weather forecast, bookmarks and thousands of other widgets in the iGoogle Add Stuff link. Hopefully some day you'll be able to read Mark Sapir's etopps blog on iGoogle without having to look at the etopps website.

Alerts: Get emailed by Google whenever a search term you select appears in the news, in blogs, videos, or anywhere on the web. I use this, for example, to track the word etopps on the web.

Google Calendar: Keep up with what you have to do with this tool and customize your calendar for your favorite team's game schedule. A cool feature is setting up reminders on the calendar to your Gmail account. At 2pm every day, I remind myself to go to the post office if I need to ship a package.

Google Documents: If you want to keep track of your transactions, Google Documents is great for setting up Excel-like documents. If you are using an Excel spreadsheet, it's easy to upload it to this program and you can share your documents via email. When setting up the sell sheets and inventory for the last card show I did, I had set it up with Google Documents and sent it to the other sellers via email for them to review.

So what are you waiting for? Set up a google account and get these free tools to make your etopps in-hand business easier to manage.