I posed this question earlier on Twitter and decided I would try to explore it more myself. We all have our own personal opinions about things and our own reasons for doing or not doing something but the question becomes when mixing business with personal when does standing on our principles become just pure stubbornness.
There are hundreds of platforms of all sizes to sell merchandise on and with all those sites you are bound to run into people that you have a personality conflict with.
Now I am intelligent enough to know that if it is just a conflict regarding personal things to just let it go and move on but what if the conflict involves your reputation and your business. I have had one such conflict in the past year and it has made me hesitant to list at any platform that person and their group of supporters are involved in. It makes me realize that just one person has the ability to damage you reputation to a great extent.
So if that person or people is part of a successful site and I have always stated I will never go where they are am I sticking to my principles as I feel I am or am I being stubborn and allowing others to prevent my business from flourishing. I guess it is a fine line between being stubborn and being principled and being wise enough to know the difference. It is just like my stance on eBay. I don’t care for it anymore and swore I would never list there again but when you have a bunch of stuff that you know will do well there and take a lot longer to be found on other platforms you have to decide which is more important getting the best price for an item or standing on ones principles. Well you can’t put food on the table with principles.
Anyone who has any thoughts or has ever run into this type of problem please feel free to post a comment. I know this is not a black and white issue and it will be interesting to see what others think.
April 7, 2009 at 7:41 pm
I figured I should comment if no one else did!
I don’t want to say that you need to kick your principles to the curb but I’m not sure if principles are the right word.
Me, I am a realist. eBay may tick me off sometimes but if the money is best there, that is where I am going to stay. It has nothing to do with principles but its what is best for your business.
The opposite holds true. If my online buddies are all really supportive of a site and love it but it doesn’t do anything for my business, I’m not going to join just because they would want me to.
If you have a personal issue with a group of people, you may need to just ignore your personal feelings on them and do what is right for your business even if it’s not what you would do “socially.”
April 7, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Thanks for responding. Normally I would tend to agree with you but in this particular case the person/people were not affecting me personally, It wasn’t that I cared what they thought of my but they were attempting to damage my reputation as a seller so it makes it difficult to allow myself to give them to opportunity to try again in a different location.
April 7, 2009 at 8:08 pm
ah OK well I could see that being a problem. I still believing in following the money but only you know your own unique situation