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 Ricky whose search for a bargain turned into an eBay business.

This is my story. It was back in 2001, when I needed some lawn mower blades for my newly purchased tractor. I went to the local tractor supply store and to my amazement a set of blades cost over $50. I had a friend who had a catalog from an aftermarket dealer who had blades similar to what I needed so I ordered them over the phone. They were a good price, only $15 for a set. Apparently I did not read the catalog right, and the blades didn't fit. Called them to return it, and prepared to ship them back. After brining them to UPS, they told me it was going to cost me $13 to ship them back, I said forget it.

I was always dabbling around www.ebay.au for a while, but then decided, that I could probably sell these and get someone else to pay for the shipping. So I listed them on ebay and the first set sold for over $50!!! So then I ordered a few more sets, and those too sold for over $40. I eventually stated ordering enough from the supplier they started to drop ship for me.

That's how I got started selling under my ebay store hosted at www.mower-blades.com. I have now expanded into small engine parts for a few other suppliers. I plan on carrying over these contacts into a future brick and mortar store after I retire.

After realizing that I found the key to ebay success. As per the movie "Robots", "See a need, fill a need", I applied this strategy to a few other items that have both come and gone. One of them was mini 8cm cd disks used in Sony Mavica cameras. I bought my Sony CD300 camera for about $800 because then a 64 mb memory card costs well over $200. I could store 128Mb on one disk, and could use multiple disks or rewritable disks. At that time normal 12cm cds cost about $.50 each, but when I went to buy the 8cm disks they cost about $2 to $3 each. So that sent me on a quest to find cheaper disks. After a lot of searching I found a distributor that sold disks from Taiwan. The cost was about $.40 each if you bought a 1000 disks. So I bought the 1st thousand and sold them in about a week. So I eventually ordered more and more, and at one time purchased 10,000 disks for sale. That business wound down after a few years because the cameras went out of style after memory prices came down.
Ricky