The Ebay experience—
selling online

By NANCY AVIGNONE - MELORE

Ebay is an auction house on the Internet. What type of items are sold or bought on Ebay? Anything from your great grandmothers’ toaster to real estate.

After a few years experience as both a buyer and a seller on Ebay, I have bought  my share of antiques, computer items, dollhouse furniture and my favorite wood and ornate boxes. I am now an avid seller. Once you sell an item which has been lurking around in your closet for years, and get a nice price for it, you’re hooked. You begin to look through those storage boxes in the attic with new eyes. Not all things will bring in a high price, but you have to take the good with the bad. Here is how to determine what to sell, the starting price, and if you should attempt to sell the item on Ebay in the first place.

As mentioned, Ebay is educational and informative. There is a “Search” box on the site where you type in what you are looking for. The fewer words you use in the search, the better. You can get more specific in a second search, in order to narrow the listings down to a more specific item. While doing a search for “wood box”, more than 500 items came up in the listing. There were just too many to look through. Narrowing down my search to “old vintage wood box” produced a shorter list, however, there were tackle boxes, fruit crates, sewing boxes, glove boxes and more. Not exactly what I was looking for, but curiosity made me view some of these items where the bidding went sky high.

The result of that search was an education on different types of collectible boxes, which I never knew were so collectible. Now I have some ammunition in the “box” department when it comes to garage sales and flea markets. By the way, I did bid on (and win) a beautiful “Victorian jewelry box” on Ebay that day.

Now back to selling. You are informed on how to “Search” on Ebay. You may not always know at what price to start your auction, and again, if you should attempt to sell it online at all. This is where the “Search Active Items” and “Search Completed Items” comes in handy. They help you research your item. If there are bidders for a similar item with worthwhile bids, put the item up for auction. If a similar item seems to be a non-desirable item, put it in a box for your own future garage sale. Even if you would just like to know the current value of something you own, nothing beats researching it on Ebay. It’s free to browse around the site and search. You may even want to check out the how-to tutorials.

Here is a personal experience. At a local live auction, I had obtained a Snoopy (Peanuts Gang) music box for $10, made by ANRI. The Ebay “Search” feature showed that many ANRI music boxes (and others) brought in about four times as much. Most of the music box auctions started at $9.99 and up. Great. I trusted the Ebay bidders would bid up the price since this is certainly a collectible. I started the auction at $12, only $2 more than it was purchased for, and held my breath. There is no guarantee of what price the music box will escalate to by auction’s end (there is a “Reserve” price auction available, but more on that in a subsequent article).

The music box auction will run for seven days. Sellers have a choice to run the auction anywhere from three to 10 days. Within six hours, I had three bids. The price was up to $38.10. Wow. There were still six days and 18 hours to go. One thing I can say about this immediate price jump: When your auction jumps like that on your first day or two, you most likely have (what I call) a home run. The end of this auction brought in $138.50. That was a grand slam! The bidder was happy, I was happy, Ebay was happy (they get a minimal fee) and I received an education on collectible music boxes.

This is only one of many experiences on Ebay. I have had some winners, and some duds. You will enjoy learning about the Ebay experience, tricks of online trading and how to become an informed and educated online buyer or seller. No matter what item you pull out of the attic or find at a garage sale, there is a collector for it. Trust me!