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'How do I fit a golf club in a Jiffy bag
For more than 10,000 people in Britain, selling on eBay is now a fulltime occupation. With a little help from the experts and his local junk shops Tom Cox spent a month earning a living as an eBay entrepreneur
An older relative of mine a sometime dealer in antique jewellery, named Jo, who describes herself as "not a computer person" recently expressed an interest in signing up to use eBay, the world's largest electronic trading community. "So how do I start?" she asked.
It struck me that the noble thing to do, as someone who had been an eBayer for the best part of a decade, would be to walk her through the basics. After all, the site used by 10.5 million people worldwide is a success due to its sheer simplicity. You want to buy something, you make a bid, it's yours. Easy.
But such has been eBay's expansion over the past few years that the site has become more sophisticated, and the prospect of explaining to a novice the dos and don'ts was a daunting one.
"Jo's on the phone," my wife would say. "She wants to know what proxy bidding is, and if someone in Australia will steal her credit card number if she clicks 'release funds' on PayPal."
Hmm. It wasn't as simple as I remembered. This is one reason why eBay itself has begun, over the last year, to develop its own academic wing. Touring the country's higher education campuses this summer, "eBay University" offers an intensive oneday course, aiming to help sellers maximise their potential, with a series of seminars, tutorials from eBay employees, and Q sessions with a panel of "Powersellers" (the term used to describe the eBay elite who among other criteria consistently sell more than worth of goods every month and maintain a 98plus per cent "positive feedback" rating).
But eBay University is not just aimed at the beginner; its course is also tailored to appeal to the growing number of people who are trying to make a fulltime living via the site. It is now estimated that the number of stayathome, electronic wheelerdealers exceeds 10,000 in Britain. He has also identified a new phenomenon: "The eBay gap year" why not use the site to help fund a trip to the East, then, while you're out there, source more cheap products to sell?
As more and more eBayers sign up, finding your way around the site becomes ever more intricate and competitive. It is an organically grown minefield, where only those who use the best sales techniques and play fair will succeed (peddling fake Louis Vuitton bags and Live8 tickets may be a nice earner, but is not encouraged).
But how easy is it to make a fulltime living from eBay? I'm speaking to Wilson because I've decided to spend a month finding out, and I'm looking for tips. Firstly, I've learned the importance of wording ("To list something as 'beautiful' or to say 'look!' is a waste of a word, because that's not what people will be tapping into the search engine,[url=http://www.sport.fr/smartphones/moncler.asp]moncler pas cher[/url]," he says). Clever categorisation is essential ("Put your monogrammed Seinfeld golf balls in the 'Comedy' section first, 'Sport' second"). And, although it seems obvious, don't end your auctions at 3am, when nobody will be around for a frenzied bidding war.
I've also learnt that two of the fastest growing areas of eBay are "clothing" and "arts and crafts". "You could try making your own stuff, doing some painting," says Wilson, who clearly hasn't seen my GCSE art interpretation of Van Gogh's Sunflowers. "The best approach is to spend your first few weeks feeling your way around, seeing what you're most comfortable with."
The first problem, as a wannabe eBay pro, is the sheer range of options to choose from. I know I can't sell frogspawn, because a lady in Gateshead recently got into trouble for doing that, but, apart from that and a few other living exceptions, everything is pretty much fair game. I'd always thought I'd have to develop David Dickinson's taste for spivvy pinstripes before I got to call myself a serious dealer, but in the world of eBay, all I have to do is sort out a user name and a PayPal account and make a trip to my local charity shop, and I'm away: it's quite exciting.
I've always been more of a seller than a buyer on eBay in the past, and the site came in very handy a year or two ago when I decided to sell half of my record collection. I've been told by Wilson that it's useful to "build up a brand" of my own, but, because I received several hundred "feedbacks" in my recordselling days, it seems sensible to retain my old user name for the time being. I decide to start by selling a random selection of items a mixture of unloved personal possessions and purchases from the charity shops in my area. I soon realise that my past selling experiences have given me unrealistic expectations. Now I must think about profit margins. It's great that I can find a retro Scandinavian ashtray in a junk shop for and sell it for but not so great when I factor in the 90minute round trip to the junk shop, and the buyer's questions that I must answer almost every hour "Could you measure the circumference for me, and does the photo give an accurate representation of the exact shade of blue?" Then there are my listing fees, the cost of packaging my items and finding a quality digital camera to photograph my wares.
Fortunately, I can take care of all this via eBay itself. It takes just four minutes to find a man who will deliver a hundred Jiffy bags and four rolls of packing tape for a competitive price by 9am the next working day.
This gets me pondering exactly how far I could take my eBay existence. Now that I'm a graduate of eBay University, do I ever have to leave my house again? Or could my every whim and need be catered for by being plugged into the website at all times? A few searches reveal that there's quite a bit of food for sale on the site mostly chocolate, admittedly but, alas, no drinks or toilet roll (that said, a few of the decorative toilet roll holders up for auction do seem to come with free Andrex, judging by the pictures).
"I know there are plenty of eBayers who don't leave the site, as far as sourcing stock is concerned," Wilson tells me, but taking advantage of the site's wholesale section seems a bit ambitious at the moment. After all, I'm not even certain what my specialist area is yet. And can you really trust someone in Arkansas to send you 5,000 pristine albums from 196975 when he spells vinyl as "vinal"?
It was reported recently that Norwich, just up the road from me, is the eBay capital of Britain, with 45 per cent of the city's population having traded on the site. I find further evidence pointing to this in the scant pickings available in Norfolk's charity shops. But at an auction of modernist designer furniture, 200 yards from my front door, and despite being out of my depth, I pick up a job lot of 1960s Studio International art magazines and some retro orange mushroom lampshades.
For the first time, I feel almost like an authentic eBay seller, buoyed by the knowledge that I will be selling my haul in the world's most democratic marketplace. On the way out of the auction, I get chatting about eBay to a nice young couple who have lucked out on an Eames Recliner. "And you make a fulltime living from it?" they ask me.
"It's certainly full time," I reply, "but whether it's a living is up for debate."
At 2am the next morning, I am obsessively watching my auctions, and answering the questions of a man in Greece who calls me "funny guy" and wants to know why the Todd Rundgren album I've sold him has no bass. The bidding on my golf club closes at 65p and leaves me worrying about how to tackle the inevitable packaging problems and how to time my visit to the Post Office to avoid the OAP rush. There are some things that even eBay University can't teach you.