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 Cheryl Werner, whose adventures on eBay began with a pop!
My husband passed away in 1996 and had been a lifelong packrat. When I began clearing out the clutter so I could move out of our house, I started with the pop bottles. Back in 1979 we were buying glass 2-liter bottles of soft drinks and my husband Roger never threw one away. He would rinse them out, put the lid back on and tuck them away in the basement. He said "These things will never catch on! They're too clumsy and heavy - I bet they'll quit making them and then these will be collector's items." Sure enough, I believe they only made them for about 18 months there in the '70s. Somehow, he managed to build an entire wall of 2-liter glass bottles lined up on their sides.
So in early 1998, I had been lurking on ebay for a few weeks just watching the action. I decided to research and see if by some miracle anyone was selling pop bottles. Wow, who knew? There were even collector clubs! So I carefully described my first 7-up bottle and painstakingly ran it through a flatbed scanner for the images. After the listing went live, it wasn't long before I received an email from an older fellow who went on and on about how well I described that bottle. He ended up buying that first bottle from me for about $16, but that wasn't the end of the story.
When he learned that I had a treasure trove in the basement, he could not contain his excitement. He made a carefully worded request to come in person and see this shrine, promising to bring his grown son with him so I wouldn't worry about being alone with him. He didn't scare me, so I agreed. This sixty-something gentleman got his son to drive him over 100 miles to my house, and I'll never forget the look of rapture on his face when I flipped the light switch to illuminate those 400+ precious bottles.
The two of them sorted through the wall of bottles and picked out close to 100 to haul back home in their pickup truck. He has written to me many times over the years and I am grateful to him for starting me out with a bang on ebay.
Cheryl Werner
(traflet on ebay)
About the author:
Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and AuctionBytes.com and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). Follow her on Twitter at @auctionbytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com.
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