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's stories highlight the lesson that, whether it's lying around the house or lying in a junk-box at a yard sale, an unwanted item just might have value to someone else!
Ina,
My new husband and I were trying to clear out some of my "stuff" to make room for his "stuff" in my 1100 sf house. I had a ceramic pot of nickels from separating my change for a couple of decades, and we dumped the coins in the bank's change counter. Then he, an experienced once-in-a-while eBayer, looked at the pot. He showed me what to do, and I got $37.50 for a pot that to me was "useful for storing change."
Then I tackled the thousands of books I'd read and kept, and those books (and others I've been collecting cheap or free since then) have been paying our utility bills for a couple of years now.
JM
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Ina,
I was living in Australia at the time. At the last garage sale of the day I spotted a box that looked to be full of junk stuff. Lots of miscellaneous paper items and folders, but down at the bottom of the box was a Monopoly set. Not just any Monopoly set but the one the seller played with as a child. I knew it was different because it had a numbered card with an arrow instead of the normal dice, which is how the Monopoly sets were made during WW11. I happily paid her the $5 dollars she wanted even though she pointed out that it was missing one of the properties. Besides the Monopoly set there were many other surprises in that box: WW11 travel documents, early century birth certificates, receipts for cremations, very old photographs, etc. I tried to return some of the items thinking that they had sentimental value but she wont have any of it. I had paid for it and I had to take it away. One less box she had to move.
Well the Monopoly set netted $60 dollars from a collector in Canada and was my very first item sold on ebay. That was way back when ebay was still privately owned and was still warm and friendly.
Tim
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Hi Ina,
My wife and I have been buying and selling on eBay since February 1998. I don't really remember my first sale, but I do remember the first sale that got a lot more than we expected. We like to scour garage sales for unusual items that we think might sell. My wife was digging around in a "dime" box (everything in the box was selling for ten cents each) and she found a pencil sharpener. It was made by the "Swing-A-Way" company in the USA and had a special mounting bracket shaped kind of like a "V." I thought we might get three or four dollars for it, so I said yes when she asked me if I thought we could sell it. Well, our surprise came about a week later when the auction ended with the high bid of $86.00! After that I was hooked. Thank you for the opportunity to share our story.
Sincerely,
Jim and Sharon (justin-tyme)
About the author:
Ina Steiner is Editor of AuctionBytes.com and author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). She has a background in marketing and research in the high-tech and publishing fields. If you have story ideas, comments or questions, send them to ina@auctionbytes.com.
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