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 Ben who had two special reasons to get online and start selling right away!

Well, Ina, it all started 1998 with some crazy doctor that looked at me and my wife and said: you're going to have twins. I realized immediately that we needed to renovate the house to prepare for the oncoming "horde".

April 1999 I registered on ebay and began selling what collectibles I had: a 30-year-old bottle of wine, an ivory chess set and 2 huge volumes of the complete works of Shakespeare...all the items sold plus some others. We raised about $10,000 all told and did the reno.

I stopped selling for a few years (a lot of diapers interfered) and then went back to it fulltime in 2003.

I now list on abebooks, bibliopoly, bibliophile, antiqbook, tomfolio, alibris and soon ebid (too bad their bulk lister is so caveman like!)

Thank you for this great e-publication that has been a tremendous help keeping us off the shoals of e-commerce.

Best regards,
Ben Katz