eBay and the Horizon of Endless Possibilities

Ebay is the most popular online auction site. It works by getting potential buyers to bid on an item, with the highest bidder buying the product for the price he or she offered.

Ebay started out as a simple site which Pierre Omidyar originally created for his then-girlfriend-now-wife Pam to help her find other Pez dispensers collectors in the Bay area. Now, the site has grown into a billion-dollar industry.

Yes, Pierre is one lucky guy. And the good news is, you can get lucky, too.

You can begin with opening a seller’s account in Ebay. You will be asked for verifiable personal information so Ebay will know who to run after if you turned out to be crook who gets the money but never delivers.

After that, you will choose a method of accepting payment from buyers. From then on, it’s just a matter of choosing what item you want to sell, how much you want them sold for, and to whom you are going to sell it.

Once you have a particular item in mind, go get your camera and take a picture of it. Upload the picture to the site and place an initial bid. Then sit back and relax. Let the bidding begin. Hopefully your product would be good enough for people to fight over.

Many people have found financial fulfillment in Ebay, and some even left their jobs and focused on selling fulltime. After all, nothing beats being your own boss and being able to work from your home anytime, and in your underwear, too, if that’s your thing. These people hit the jackpot with Ebay because they are trustworthy sellers, and that is essential in making buyers come back for more.

But more importantly, they have chosen the right product to sell and found a market where they could sell the same. Some have even set up online stores so buyers can have more variety to choose from.

With the exception of pirated items, there is no limitation on what you can sell on E-bay. You can sell standard items like apparel, furniture, jewelry, and electronics, among other things. Many of these items are being sold on the site because they have the most buyers. However, if you have a taste for the eccentric, you can sell unusual items on Ebay, and the more unusual yet positively true thing is that someone out there will be willing to buy them.

In fact, Ebay has a ‘Weird Stuff” category in its items-for-sale directory and that category is subdivided into ‘Slightly Unusual,’ ‘Real Weird,’ and ‘Totally Bizarre.’ You can’t imagine just how eccentric and unusual the items being sold under these categories are. It will be better for you to go to the Ebay site and see for yourself.

If you don’t want to venture into the realm of the weird but still can’t think of an item to sell, look around your home and see what you can get rid of. You won’t get thousands of dollars from your trash (but who knows, anything goes in a bidding), but it will not hurt if you can get a few dollars for them. If you think that no one would buy your broken appliances, then think again. There was once a seller who thought no one would bid for his broken transistor radio, but was surprised when an engineering student bought it, and when the seller asked the student why he bought it, the student said he wanted to learn about repairing electronic gadgets.

As the saying goes, ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’

So before you throw out that moldy sandwich you just unearthed from your bag’s hidden depths, think of the possibility of a biologist somewhere at the other side of the world who’s willing to pay a few dollars for your sandwich so she can use it for her study on molds. That’s not probably going to happen, but if Jay Leno confirmed in his talk show that someone actually paid for a Dorito chip shaped like a Pope’s hat for a thousand dollars, then, anything is quite possible.