eBay
Me and my wife were at the mall this weekend and stopped by the Apple Store as she needed a case for the iPod Mini that I had bought for her in April but which didn’t actually arrive until last week! While there I saw the the new 4G iPods and wouldn’t you know it, I somehow convinced myself I should get one! So now my old 3G 30GB iPod is up on eBay as well as a 256MB SD card.
I first used eBay back in probably 1998, after my sister told me about it. My first experience was not the greatest. I sold my VCR to some guy in Texas who sent me a check. I didn’t send the VCR right away, but kept waiting and looking at my bank account. Finally, after a few days, the amount was added to my account, so I went ahead and sent it out. Several days after that, or maybe a week, I got a notice from my bank that the check had bounced and my account had been charged $5. So I email the guy who is initially nice and says to redeposit it as he was in the process of moving and getting a different account but had put money back in. Reluctantly I redeposited it and got the same result. So at this point I asked for a money order for the original amount plus the $10 additional he owed for the bank charges. I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks, so sent another letter, then another, getting increasingly less friendly, although I never resorted to threats, name-calling, or anything like that. The only threat I made was that I would have to give him a negative rating and contact eBay’s fraud department if he didn’t respond. Finally after a month or so he did respond, saying he’d been out of the country. Furthermore, he said, it was “my fault” because I was the one who sent the VCR before the money was actually cleared. Nevertheless, he told me, he still intended to send the money. I waited a few more weeks and never got anything despite his claims to have sent payment. Finally, I went ahead and gave him a negative, and then he returned the favor, so this is my only negative on eBay. This guy isn’t even a registered user of eBay, at least not under his old account. I kept my eBay account intact despite this, but it took me a while to venture back after this first bad experience.
Most of what I’ve done on eBay is selling. I actually found a place in the town I now live that was selling used DVD’s as well as some highly-discounted new ones for very cheap - $5-$15. You can now get these prices at any large retailer, but back then it wasn’t as easy. I probably sold a couple hundred of these over the course of a couple of years before finally deciding it was too much work for the effort. My average take after shipping charges, eBay’s fees, etc., came to about $5 per DVD. That might not sound bad, but when you are selling an average of 3 or 4 a week, that’s only $15 or $20 for what amounts to a couple of hours of work if you included driving to the post office a couple of times and mailing the things, spending a half hour looking through used DVD’s at the store, posting the auctions and emailing with the customers, etc. Not much better than minimum wage, and after a while not a whole lot of fun!
I still use eBay on occasion to sell things, but generally have not used it to buy a lot, at least nothing big. Part of the reason is because you are taking more of a risk. You’re often not dealing with a real business that you can call up the BBB or the local news. Getting one’s money back is generally a very difficult task unless you use third party escrow services, which I suppose I would demand if I were buying something more expensive than a few hundred dollars.
I did have a couple of instances on eBay where I got way more than expected. There were a couple of guys who decided to bid up the price of a used DVD I bought for $10 to a whopping $41! You could go online and buy this same DVD for $25! At least back in the late 90’s when this was all pretty new, people would get carried away and decided they had to have some item that they had thought they won because they had been the winning bidder for several days. This of course doesn’t work with more expensive items as the people who are bidding are probably not doing it as a “whim” – I tried unsuccessfully a few times to sell my mom’s baby grand piano. A number of people actually came to her house to look at it. The problem with a piano, though, is that the moving cost can be prohibitive! So despite it’s being worth $3,000 or so, the highest bid we got for it I believe was around $1,500.
I occasionally get spam that talks about creating businesses to sell stuff on eBay, but this just reminds me of my pseudo business with the used DVD’s. Somehow selling stuff online is just not all that interesting! I’m sure there are pleanty of folks that can make a decent living selling all kinds of things online, but to me it just seems like a whole lot of detail and you’re not actually using your mind in a creative way or actually helping people in any significant way – other than getting them some gadget or toy or something that they want.