Do you remember the first item you ever sold online? Let us know by sending an email to ina@auctionbytes.com and we may publish your story. Today we hear from BillyBobCPU who discovered eBay can be a profitable way to recycle!

In your newsletter you asked for emails on the first item ever sold. My first item sold ended up "opening the floodgates" for me selling on eBay where, over time, I made PowerSeller under 3 different selling ID's. Of course, that was back when making PowerSeller seemed very hard to do as opposed to appearing easy. Easy is a relative term where I am certain new sellers wonder what makes it happen.

Anyway, I digress. My first item to sell on eBay was certainly a fluke, as I was planning on throwing the item in the weekly recycle bin for curbside pickup. I don't do eBay or auction sales full time, but have a full time job in the Corporate world. My day job required me to have a laptop, and for a period of 12 months I seemed to be getting a replacement Compaq every other month due to faulty motherboards on the machines. With each new laptop came a new set of paper instruction / user manuals that piled up in the closet.

Preparing for a move, I was cleaning out the closet in late 1998 / early 1999. Talking to a co-worker in the cube pit one day, I told him about all of the junk I had accumulated (including the manuals) and how I was going to throw a lot of it away. He recommended I throw one of them up on eBay to see what happens as I would only be out the quarter listing fee if it didn't sell. I took his advice and put in a plain-text ad with no graphics, put in a reasonable shipping and handling price, and started the bidding at 99 cents.

One week later, to my amazement, the manual sold for about $20. I put up for auction the rest of the manuals, plus a lot of the other stuff that was "junk," and after about two weeks and a lot of trips to the post office I had about $1,000 to start off my new marriage and first home purchase. Needless to say, I was hooked and continued selling off things I would normally throw away as well as looking for sourced materials to sell and make a few bucks.

I continued that philosophy of trying to sell cast off or throwaway items when I switched jobs to a telecom company to great success, even using it as a new marketing channel to upsell our product offerings with inserts included in the auction winners packages.

I've scaled it back lately due to increasing "real" job commitments and additions to our family - the time bandits are really at work now - and now just sell under one eBay ID. It's been fun, I've learned a heck of a lot, and made some good cash along the way.
Regards,
"BillyBobCPU"