We've been signed up with eBay since Saturday, March 14, 1998, but we didn't really start selling until April of 2001. You might say we spent the first 3 years doing research - buying stuff, seeing how eBay worked and finding out what we liked and disliked about online transactions. We're still learning, of course, but the main thing we've learned is no surprise: if you sell to the public, you need to put a lot of yourself into the selling. And, because you're not dealing with folks face to face, communication is vital; you just can't have too much. Pretty basic business sense.

Our eBay handle (or identity) is golden_valley and we have a feedback rating of over 3,600. We put in some long days (and weeks, and months...) keeping the business going. We were at the point of trying to maintain about 20 to 30 auctions a day, and that's a lot of work. That also forced us to plan pretty far ahead if we need to go somewhere. A day trip (shopping in Las Vegas, an auction in Phoenix, etc.) just means an awfully long day, anything longer meant we had to make sure no ads expired while we were gone. We had all our emergencies scheduled for when we're in a nursing home, 30 or 40 years from now.

Our division of labor worked out real well. Linda was the resident html expert, Benney was the computer god. Linda did almost all the bookkeeping, Benney did almost all the corespondence. Linda sold mostly books and computer software, Benney sold mostly computers and computer parts. We each wrote and maintained our own ads. Our business tools were 3 computers networked together, using 4 different printers and a two-way wireless system for internet access. We live 20 miles, or so, from the nearest U.S. Post Office and that daily trip gave us time to communicate and make plans.

We designed and wrote all our own ads using a simple "notepad" type word processor called EditPad. We like the control we get doing it that way. Here are 3 examples of our ads. First is one Linda wrote for a book, then one Benney wrote for a motherboard and finally one we worked on together for some educational software. We always had pictures with our ads, since eBay hosts the first picture free. We made all our own pictures using either a digital camera or a scanner, and we made them the right type & size by using a graphics editing program called Paint Shop Pro. The pictures must be okay, because we saw other folks stealing them and using them with their ads. Sometimes they stole and used our ads, too.

Update: April, 2007....

We stopped selling on eBay in May of 2004 when one of us started drawing Social Security. The new income almost exactly equalled what we were able to make selling on eBay, so we decided to take a break - a few months off to recharge our batteries - and we've not gone back.... yet. After three years of 24/7/365 (almost) it was time for a break.

Now, almost three years later, we feel like we're ready to do something again, but are not sure that eBay will be that something. EBay has changed, quite a lot, since we started selling there - and not for the better for small sellers. As a percentage of sales, eBay's seller's fees have grown larger and larger, and their policies have shifted more and more to favor the large retailer at the expense of the Mom & Pop type small seller.

Don't get me wrong; eBay is still an opportunity for the average person to be his (or her) own boss, it's just not as simple as it once was. And we're not sure we want to make the changes that are now necessary to be competitive (and profitable) on today's eBay. Our goal is to set up our own on-line store - Next Door eStore, so we may go back to selling on eBay, at least for awhile, in an attempt to attract traffic to the store... IF we ever get the store up and running! We'll see.