My Ebay Adventure
I was introduced to Ebay by a friend of mine who was making a good living selling sports memorabilia and specializing in hockey cards. Over several years until about 2005 he was making almost as much on Ebay as he was at his regular job and was able to pay off his mortgage in about 6-7 years. Not bad! I was wanting to make some extra income and Ebay looked very promising. I had an account and was mostly using it to purchase computer-related components since I liked to tinker with puters and was always upgrading or repairing my own or computers for friends and relatives. I decided that it would be best to sell something that I knew a little bit about, in which I did have somewhat of an expertise. It would be fun to sell laptops! so, I spend dozens of hours online looking for distributors who would provide laptops and even registered a business name for income tax purposes so that I could acquire the laptops that I needed directly from the distributor. However, the expense seemed more than I wanted to handle, so I began investigating companies who would dropship for me. I found a company in near Salinas, California who would build PCs to orders and then ship directly to my customers. Sounded like a good deal, so now all I had to do was advertise on Ebay to find customers willing to put up the cash and I’d be in business.
I researched the configurations that seemed to be selling best on Ebay and the price which they were going for and the logged into the company website and configured 3 laptops. I listed them in Ebay and featured the most expensive one as a Featured Listing with a “Buy It Now” price while the other two I listed as normal auction items. This made a huge difference since the featured laptop sold in 3 days to a fellow in Wales. On was on my way to making a good income, yes! Or so I thought…….
I could go on forever about Ebay and my experiences there, but since this blog is more about what I’m doing now and the good things to come in the future, I’ll keep it short.
Well, turns out that I miscalculated with my asking price as opposed to my expenses. Laptops are an expensive item as opposed to most items sold on Ebay and thus the cost of advertising, listing the item and then Ebay’s cut for a successful auction left me with very little profit, but a profit nonetheless. I continued to sell laptops for a couple more months and sold a couple dozen, but more often than not they went onsold, which cut into my overall profits. After making my last sale to a soldier was leaving for Iraq, (for whom I arranged special delivery so that he could pick it up during a stopover in Hawaii) I decided to call it quits. The amount of work for little profit was not worth the hassle. It would be much better sell to many low cost items then to sell just a few high cost items due to the high costs of advertising those expensive items and then not selling them. Ws Ebay a failure? Yes and no. I like to take the eternal optimist approach and say that I was educated and and better prepared for my next venture. 
Laters,
-Richard
