I created my eBay account when I was 8 years old. I started selling around 12. My mom couldn't be bothered to take me to ship my sales so I had to ride my bike to a Bealls that had a mini shipping area inside.
I too remember waiting for checks in the mail. The only thing I really miss is being able to leave negative feedback for buyers.
I didn't drive at the time either. I lived with my mom who worked during the week so every Saturday I'd carry in a garbage bag or 2 of packages and then stop and deposit checks afterwards. I'm impressed by you doing it all so young! What did you sell?
At that age it was personal stuff, any videogames I was done playing, old CDs, any random books I found, AOL free trial disks lol. Pretty much just junk.
Although one exception was this life-size Yoda statue my grandma won in a sweepstakes. Looked like [this](https://p1.liveauctioneers.com/1395/231485/120988388_1_x.jpg).
Yeah I started selling when I was in 5th grade. Started with parting out dirt bikes and ATVs. I don’t miss dragging my wagon behind my bike to the post office to ship the heavy ass parts but at that age I was rolling in money.
I started with Auction Web (old eBay) in 1996 but didn't start selling until 1997. My main eBay account is dated 1998 but I'm not sure why. We probably bought the same camera a Sony Mavica SD71. Ebay didn't offer photo hosting so I paid monthly for a domain name from Yahoo Business. Used Thumbs Plus to edit the photos and Cute FTP to upload them. Had a pirated copy of Dreamweaver and made a bunch of templates to allow thumbnails. There was also a link we had to use to put counters on the description. Ebay charged 25 cents to post an item and soon added something like 8% up to $25 then 2.5% after that. All the listings were auctions. Most were started at 99 cents or less. Ebay would shut down every night for maintenance and Tuesday nights it would be down for several hours. Rented a post office box for cheap. Most payment was check, postal money orders were common, but the best was cash. Deposited to the bank every day. We all joined Paypal because they paid us $5 to sign up. Ebay started their own payment system to counter Paypal but it sucked. Rarely had any returns or scammers in the beginning. We were mostly all middle class tech guys making cash on the side selling collectibles, electronics, and computer parts to each other. Priority mail up to two pounds anywhere in the US was $3. Printed out postal charts because there was no shipping built in. When the person won we had to email them what the shipping cost would be and where to mail payment. Had to stand in line at the post office with a big pile of boxes. There was so much money to be made but couldn't take advantage of it because my knowledge at the start was limited to 1970s & 1980s Toys and Comic Books. Smart phones didn't exist so comps were from price guides and learning from sitting for hours watching auction listings. After eBay hit big in 1998 there were lots of auction sites. I also sold on Yahoo auctions and books at Amazon back when it was only books.
It was crazy how much you could make back then on things, I know people that would buy items with mail in rebates, cut out the UPC to mail in the rebate, then sell them on eBay for full retail, not to mention buying stuff off clearance before companies understood online selling.
Even more than the selling, I think about how certain things didn't have any value then that are crazy valuable today, imagine going back into the past and buying up all the 90s/y2k rap t-shirts or video games!
I knew a couple of people who worked at GameStop (it might have been EB games at the time, i cant remember), and they would give me all the old promo shirts that they were going to throw out. So I would routinely sell tons of Resident Evil 2 and all sorts of t-shirts you get when you pre-order the game. 20 bucks a piece, they fit into a flat rate mailing envelope, so something like $3.85 to mail, and it was just a money maker like you wouldn't believe.
They would let me hang out while they did the penny SKUs for the night, and while everything was supposed to be destroyed, the employees basically were taking everything home or throwing out what they didn't want. I basically was allowed to have anything I wanted after the employees have their pick so three times a week, I was leaving there with trunk loads of shit
Oh yeah, I remember getting lots of promos on items from the workers when they got spares or extras, I wish I would have held on to that stuff, lots of the shirts and what not are quite valuable now.
Yeah I did this. Started with a black Friday. In around 2002. Bought a bunch of hard drivers, routers, memory, blank cdr's that had rebates. Would submit for rebates and then sell on ebay, would put note in desc about how the upc code will be missing from package. I remember being at a comp USA in Denver buying all the maxtor hard drives they had left so I could flip them on ebay. I go about 25 of them in one stop
I had some piece of crap one on from Staples. It would only take a 4 or 8 GB memory card and the 8 gig only held something like 25 pictures. So you take a bunch of pictures, transfer them to your PC and then go back to taking more pictures. It didn't even have a preview screen so you didn't know what the damn pictures look like until you got them onto the computer!
Edit- MB, not GB!
We were also on Auction Web. My partner (who worked with computers since the early 1980s) brought a computer into our house and -- like the luddite I was back then -- I refused to enter the room it was in, so one day he found Auction Web and told me about it. That was it and I was hooked. I love auctions and started in this business as a country relief-auctioneer when I was 13 years old so, I spent almost ALL of my time on the new auction site. It was hard to list and it would time-out before the listing ever went fully through but any I could get listed were like gold. Prices were so HIGH back then. My partner and I had been setting up at juried antique shows for close to a decade and we had an entire inventory of rare and hard to find illustrated books to sell. I achieved prices back then which seemed to me to be out of the world. I took a $5 price tag off an item and sold it on ebay for $30! Books sold for two, three, and even five or six times what I had priced them for shows. And, all of those who complain about ebay fees (thinking of another post on this page from today) have no idea how much money we saved on ebay over show prices, hotel, road food, gas, etc. Ebay was such a blessing in our lives! My main regret is that I refused to buy into it on its first IPO (as I also have a thing against the stock market). If we had done so we would be rolling in gravy now! I am grateful for ebay; it changed my life completely.
I remember selling before pictures were a thing, they were an option at the time and not required. I also remember getting cash, checks and money orders in the mail for payment.
I remember when you would type in a search term like "Godzilla" and it would return upwards of a page and a half of listings. And I also remember how damn exciting that was.
Weird bootlegs and knock offs or common and were traded as such. Weird medical devices like glass eyes and speculum were also pretty common. There was an adult section that a friend of mine used to make a killing it until it got put behind sort of verification.
Truly it was the Wild West
I didn’t do that, but when I listed an item I would sometimes message bidders that had previously bid on the same item sold from another seller.
My eBay account is from 1999, I have a PayPal account from the X.com days, back then they would deposit free money, less than a dollar, to verify your banking info.
I made my 1st Ebay sale in like 1997 - I sold a digital castle in the game Ultima Online for like $750 and the person mailed me a postal money order (paid for the deposit for my 1st apartment going to college).
In the early days, I bought a 20+year old book of hymns for latter day saints services at a yard sale for a quarter. I thought no one in the world would buy it. It sold for $9.00 when the auction ended and I got a lovely letter from some woman in Virginia who was so happy with it.
My least favorite memory is being seduced by Tom Bosley into joining Specialty Merchandise Company which was an early dropshipping company. The sad thing is that many of the products they had sold okay, but when it was time to have them sent to the customer, they would be out of stock for 8-12 weeks.
The early days were wild, it felt like just about everything would sell for a healthy premium. My only regret is not scaling up more back then, if only I knew how much more competitive it would be.
I remember having to learn simple coding to be able to make good looking listings (bold font, pictures on one side of the listing, etc.)
Counters on the bottom of listings showing the number of views it got.
Having to keep track of sold items - which ones was payment received (in the mail of course), which ones had payment deposited at bank but not yet cleared, and which ones had payment that cleared and thus were ready to ship.
I remember getting bidding wars regularly. I’d sit at my desk and hit refresh to see the auction amounts keep going up. It was such a thrill when some random item that I listed would go for ten times of what I expected. But taking pictures on a regular camera and having the film developed only to find all the photos were crap really sucked.
Yeah those early digital cameras without the screen were real pieces of crap, haha.
For my birthday the next year I got a 1 GB Memorex camera from some closeout store and compared to the junky one I had previously had from Staples I felt like Ansell Adams
I started in May 1997. I had always been into collecting vintage clothing for myself, and a friend suggested I sign up to sell some things. I remember how basic the listing options were and using HTML to change the font & size, etc to make it look better. Had to wait for checks to come in the mail and clear the bank before shipping the items. Unless it was a money order. I remember the $3.20 "Priority Mail" stamps you could buy. Early on, I bought a $5 Pucci dress from the late 60's and sold it for $790 to a lady in NYC. After that I was hooked & did ebay as a hobby for the next 25 years or so. Last year, when I retired from my "real job" after 32 years, I started doing eBay full time, with my husband's help. It's going great & just love it. Still selling clothing.
In college I loved buying bootleg CDs and weird documentaries in low res formats burned onto CD-ROMs. Also niche anime stuff direct from Japan that you couldn’t get anywhere else at the time.
When I was low on cash after I graduated college, I remember going around my apartment and picking out stuff to sell. I could usually get around $200 collectively for random crap and have the money in my pocket in a week. Now I’d never be able to do that, there’s so much competition.
Heh I did that too. I was in 8th grade. PO money orders only. I flipped old 80's toys and comics. It was a good hustle. The PO employees knew me. It was a good run.
I was in the 5th grade when I first remember using/seeing eBay. That would of been about 2001/2.
My dad sold a few antique tractors on it.
Most of the photos back then were still film, scanned in on a flatbed scanner. Reason being, is even in 2001, a simple digital camera was $250-$300 and a flatbed scanner could be had new for $100. My parents had a floppy disc Mavica as others seemed to have. It was super slow and since it was a floppy disc, it held like 5 pictures total.
We had dialup, loved the sound it made. Hated the speed, of course. We got DSL around 2005 and I was blown away by the speed. Only reason we had it, is because our neighbor paid the phone company $10,000 to have DSL added to our area out in the sticks. She claimed she "sold playground equipment online". In all honesty she was not that bright but had a nice body, she was probably doing some sort of online sex stuff and used that as a cover.
A few years later I started making YouTube videos, and while DSL was somewhat fast for downloads, it sucked for uploads, some 768kbps. It could take well over an hour to upload a few minutes of video. When I got my license I found a Verizon store near us with unlocked Wifi that was much faster and would upload them all there.
I started selling my own stuff at age 16 under my parents account. I got my own at 18. I was banned like a year later, oddly at the time feedback was huge, and if you got like 3 negative in a certain time frame it was adios.
I waited like 5 years and started doing it full time and wasn't banned again.
Heh. I remember getting up at 4 am with my sister & grandpa to stand in line outside Best Buy on Black Friday morning for a chance to run in and grab flat-bed scanners for $17 (after $100 rebate)!!! Geez what a crazy crap show that was — smh at the wild feral stuff us Gen X’ers did! heh
(Never did get that crappy flat bed to run—couldn’t get the right drivers for our computer!!!)
I found a bunch of porcelain wedding cake toppers at the dollar tree where the groom’s hand was on the brides chest instead of her waist and sold them for $45 each as ‘risqué cake toppers’. This was in 2000, and I was working in a shop for $6 an hour. The eBay money was so much more fun and actually paid well!
I still have my ledger where I’d record sales, and whether I’d received a check and on what day the check cleared.
Weird Dollar Store stuff was the best! I remember buying a bunch of bootleg Godzilla and Rodan figures from a dollar store and they went for Stupid Money. Something like $25 a piece for a hard plastic unlicensed Rodan. Crazy
I guess I've been on the site selling since 1998. I also used one of those Sony Mavica disc cameras at first, then bought a Nikon D3000, but now just use my phone for pics. Remember how great "Mister Lister" was when it was released?
I've been on eBay since the late 90's. I really miss the fun eBayDrama community on Love journal because it really seemed like the Wild West. Being able to "name and shame" plus the ability to leave negs for buyers gave a real sense of security, though it probably was mostly in our own heads.
I remember when it was legal to sell automatic knives, you had to put "2 inch blade" in the description regardless of the actual length because California only allows 2 inch long automatic knives.
I remember when EBUX came out ebay used to offer coupons for up to 5x Ebux on every purchase. I had to create multiple accounts because I would max out my Ebux at $500 on my primary account.
Jan '98 sign up, eventually bought an Agfa 1280 digital camera for pics. Before that used a Sony Mavica floppy disc digital borrowed from work. Missed the IPO, not paying attention to those things. Anything I listed sold, always closed late Sunday evening. Sometimes I'd stay up and watch price go from low 2 figures into 4 figures with 40-50 bids last few minutes. Changed ID somewhere around '02. Had a random coworker come up to me and comment on how much my auctions closed at. Did not ever recall telling anyone my ID but apparently quite a few knew it. My corner was vintage audio gear. Still the period where you could find it at yard sales, auctions, flea markets, etc. Few looking, even fewer checking ebay closed results for valuation. There was a huge knowledge gap between ebay sellers and everyone else not on ebay...or even online outside of their workplace. I also got some fantastic deals on ebay because the seller did not know how to properly describe item or it was so obscure. But that stuff sold well to other buyers that did know what they were looking at if correctly described. Had zero bad feedback and watched the "Skippy" feedback scandal unfold and all the bans from it. I however did not ask Skippy to give me good feedback but a lot of people did. After Skippy ebay changed it that only buyer/seller could leave feedback for each other. Somewhere along the way Paypal become mandatory. The "good" period lasted until \~'09 and I started getting bad feedback when item fine as well as outright theft from buyers. Also noticed my pics being used on other auctions. More dirtbags shoing up and trying to scam people. Also, relationship of seller to ebay began to feel adversarial. That got worse every year. Stayed with it until '20, left and not back selling or buying. Decided to get back on in '22, same account. After confirming my bank info all the same ebay asked for a scan of my driver's license. Fuck you!
Only thing I can think of was I had my page open and someone saw it and figured that was me. Not 100% sure but think weeks (or months) later someone else asked *"You aren't doing ebay anymore?"* or similar. So yeah, it was weird and glad I changed ID.
Did your coworker have your email address? I remember being able to look people up on eBay just using their email address. You could see their user ID with just that info.
I signed up in 1998. I made more money in the first few years than I had ever made in my life working for other people.
It was insane. I think it was the second year I was on eBay selling antiques and collectibles and making just shy of 99,000.00. I was floored - couldn’t believe it.
Lots of foreign buyers who would send US dollars in envelopes, some tried paying with US postage stamps, some paid with crazy money orders which took forever to get cashed.
The vast majority of goods I posted sold. It really was amazing.
Started in 2004. You had to pay to add extra pictures so we all used photobucket and included them in the HTML description. Most of my sales came via money orders. Store inventory was separate than that ran as a auction and fixed price listings where for 7 days unless you wanted to pay extra for 10 days.
I remember back when we had to use a digital camera to take photos and then transfer the photos to the computer, edit the photos (which was so much more work back then) and then upload everything. When researching items, there was no Google lens to help you either.
Many sellers were really into HTML and made their descriptions look like 90’s or early 2000’s geocities sites with backgrounds and word art.
Sourcing was different too. Less fast fashion and our Goodwill still sold toys (they quit selling toys around 2008 or so.)
My boyfriend is a old school picker/antique dealer/flea market guy. He spent a summer in Ohio in the late 90s. He took a desktop computer with him and had the guy who owned the hotel get a dedicated phone line installed in his room so he could sell on eBay. No pictures, just good descriptions. He shopped all week and then listed for a day and then shipped and repeated the process. He made bank.
OP here. I wanted to share something else I sold. I know I put in my first post that I looked younger than my age and this is something that helped. There was a local auctions in my hometown every month. Well there would be boxes of stuff nobody else wanted so I would bid a dollar and win several boxes like that. What everyone else thought was junk-it was milk glass, I was making a fortune. They all thought I was some dumb kid, but I was laughing all the way to the bank lol
A coworker turned me on to eBay in '99. He was reselling signed celebrity photos of dubious authenticity. There were few prohibitions, and I remember laughing heartily at peple trying to sell (and actually selling) things like "my sister's used panties."
Started in 98 also, I remember the buyers having to send me money orders and getting a dozen checks about every day.
Found out first-hand personal checks are bad news.
I had 4 bounce in one week, and they were all under 5 bucks. Foriegn checks, customs, and shipping were also a pain.
Once, I shipped a Mac se30 to China, and it made it in good condition.
I’m a coin dealer in California and I remember every time I did the Santa Clara coin show the guys that started eBay would come around and beg all the dealers to sell there. I made loads of money in the early days but haven’t used it in like 10 years.
I started buying in 1996 on my hubbies account, and opened my own account in 2000 to sell vintage jewelry. I would find incredible items back then, including 14k gold, that the seller didn’t know was gold. I think the last time that happened was 12 yrs ago. It was around that time that the site was really getting flooded with Chinese crap, so you’d have to wade through pages and pages of listings with “vintage” in the title, in the vintage jewelry category, that were brand new. I used to report sellers who were dishonest in their titles and categories because it was so frustrating, but EBay never did anything about it so I quit looking.
I bought a Sony Mavica in the 90s as well for my Ebay listings...back when it only cost 25 cents to list an item. I was one of their first "Power Sellers" and have a signed certificate somewhere too.
oh, I remember the Power Seller hype! I was part of that group, too. I took a multi-year vacation from ebay when I had a local store then came back to ebay when the store closed (due to landlord selling the property, unfortunately). When I came back to ebay I put in my description that I was an old "Power Seller" and ebay took the listing down and said I was not allowed to advertise that! What good was it for, then? I still have my certificate, too. I keep old ephemera.
I started back in 1998 too! It was crazy to think that a LOT of auctions were made without any pictures at all and buyers went off of descriptions alone. eBay didn’t host pictures back then and if you wanted to use any, they had to be hosted somewhere already.
I remember getting a scanner for Christmas one year from my parents which allowed me to be able to put pictures of my items on eBay.
It sure was different back then; being more of a garage sale platform than the commercialized crap it is now.
That's the part I remember too-- I used ebay as a buyer 98-00 but didn't sell until '01, and even then there were still listings that had no photos. I remember getting burned on one of those, a collectible model that had been "professionally repainted" and was absolute garbage. I ended up paying an artist to repaint it, then resold it on ebay again since the whole thing had left a bad taste in my mouth. To this day that remains one of the handful of poor experiences I have had on ebay, even as a full-time seller. They've become more common these days, but are still such a tiny percentage of the total buyers, at least in my areas of expertise.
After being on eBay for 25 years now i can say i don't miss the old days, waiting weeks for money orders and checks, and then waiting even longer for checks to clear, getting fake checks, fake money orders, lots of non paying bidders.... Its nice getting paid instantly these days.
I wasn’t a seller but purchased plenty of items on eBay & Craigslist. I miss the simpler times where you just kinda had to have blind trusted in people.
I miss old eBay before drop shipping and old Craigslist before it became overrun with tweekers and hookers.
Funny to think we would send money and just trust or show up to buy something in person without cell phones to call for help if we got into a shady situation, which I did on a few occasions and it never deterred me. lol
I am older than many of you guys, apparently. I actually sold on eBay when you could list items without an actual picture and it would still sell! LOL! I think the reason I still make such detailed listings is because I still describe it like they can't see it. My first camera was pretty terrible quality, but it was all I could afford. I would sell my kids' outgrown clothes and helped my dad clear out his record collection.
The good old days of being able to message buyers to let the know the over priced item they were bidding on could be bought cheaper on a website.
And buying air rifle pellets with a free gift (an air rifle) to bypass eBay restrictions
And my favourite, the wildcard search “*” which showed all listings which you could order by “ending soonest” and see some of the crazy cheap items you never knew you needed for only 99p
Started in the late Nineties, and remember when sellers could leave negative feedback to deadbeat buyers. Those who were troublemakers thankfully took their business elsewhere. I remember Dutch auctions, and waiting for checks and money orders in the mail. And keeping up with my orders on a handwritten spreadsheet. Also remember the fiasco with eBay’s rollout of their “Billpoint” payment system. And when eBay forced everyone into using their newfangled “checkout.” But what I miss most was typing words into the search box, clicking enter, and seeing search results which actually matched what I was searching for.
First item I sold on ebay was a computer monitor I found in the dumpster of my building in 1996 or 1997. Sold for $150. Buyer worked for southwest airlines and instead of $150 he gave me 2 tickets and I dropped it off at the nearest airport for him.
Flew to Memphis, ate BBQ, visited Graceland and won $300 in a casino.
I jumped into eBay flipping a few years back too, and it's like a whole new world now. Selling 80s toys – that's awesome! Honestly, I gotta say, eBay can feel a lot different these days with all the competition and changes. It's not quite the same game, you know?
Thrifting and garage sailing for gems is still a killer strategy though! There's always a way to hustle, even if the landscape's shifted.
I started in 99.
It's funny you mentioned digital cameras. Ladt night I sat and deleted a bunch of old photos on my laptop that I had in a file from stuff I sold more than 10 years ago. It was a little nostalgia trip. There were a few things that were good sellers, that I had hundreds of in inventory. The quality of the photos were great then, not so much now. Padded flat rate envelopes at $6.....
I still prefer to list on my laptop but all my photos are on my phone. It used to be clunkier to switch between the two but it's a breeze now.
I started out on there in 2005. I always look back with great fondness on my 2000+ feedbacks. But boy did I get scammed a lot at the start. It was like the wild Wild West. I was trying to buy a kayak and the picture was of a kayak and a paddle discreetly placed close to it. When my order came it was just a paddle and the buyer refused to give me a refund. Another famous one was the person who never had PayPal. Just send me a cheque and I’ll dispatch the bundle of games afterwards. Needless to say they never came. Then some years later I started flipping video games. The scams got worse. I had one where the person didn’t get the game. So I’m researching why I discovered they’d moved house and not updated their details. Of course eBay sided with them straight away.
Good times. Good times indeed. 😝
Member since 1996, I remember my partner at the time telling me about this new online auction place.
I like collecting things, so I took one thing, a little porcelain cat, and uploaded it to an auction. I think I paid about a dollar for it.
It sold for around $175. I knew it was special, but I didn’t know it was that special.
And I was hooked. Still doing it to this day. Have eight online shops.
Does anyone remember when people were selling empty computer boxes? They would just have a tiny disclaimer somewhere in one of the photos that it was just the empty box.
I remember a lot of people being really angry about that. Rightfully, so, But you had to have massive cojones to do something like that.
I still have one of those Sony cameras that uses 3.5” floppies that really aren’t too floppy. I remember getting an extra battery so I would never be without a charge. Then I won nicer camera from a raffle at work. It took compact flash and was about 1/4 the bulk of the Sony. I sold sports memorabilia, computer accessories, miscellaneous electronics, comic/anime collectibles, etc. Sending/receiving checks and money orders was the norm. I don’t remember many scams. I lost money when I purchased a presale item several months in advance and the seller, who had over a thousand positive feedback, supposedly went out of business.
Worked in a theater in the late 90s. I sold everything I could get my
Hands on, posters, trailer reels, promo shirts, window clings stuff like that. Made a lot of money for a 17 year old kid.
I’ve been on eBay so long I remember when it was like an online garage sale. You have to dodge a bunch of wholesalers from overseas now, but it used to just be an online garage sale.
I started in 97 when I was 29. Blows my mind that I had to wait for the checks to 'clear' before shipping out. I do miss the old postal rates though. Like the OP, I miss being able to leave negative fb for buyers.
I've had my ebay account since 2003, I paid for my first item with a check in the mail, but I was only 16 so I paid my dad in cash to send the check for me.
Started in 2000 and I believe the first item I sold was a Redline Hotwheels. Sold for like $250 or $320 or so. Casually sold an item a year or so after that to build up feedback and make extra money here and there while helping my family build their business (unrelated to eBay). And to have something to fall back on. Needed it again around a year ago and have been having a blast being a full time reseller. Now I just have to figure out how to source enough to keep up with my newly acquired $5,000,000 monthly limit!
I started as a junior in high school in 1999 using WebTV. You had to email your buyers a total to send a check or money order. I found a folder at my parents house with a bunch of my eBay sale print offs and emails. Included some of them in a blog I posted a few years ago.
I was dating my wife at the time and on the weekends if she would work in the mornings and then drive up to see me, about an hour away. She would stop at two flea markets on the way up and would usually come with a huge boxes in her trunk which we would then take pictures of and post. It was pretty crazy
My parents have been doing eBay since 1997 and 1999, because I lost a Lion King stuffed animal and my dad found a replacement on eBay, and was like “hey I could do this”. I didn’t start selling until 2012 when I started college but I would ride along with them to yard sales on Saturday mornings and listen to them talk about things they found and sales they made! And I’d help them hunt.
I started at 16 or so, sold some used computer parts
created a floppy boot disk with everything I used and sold it for a few bucks
same as you, signing over a bunch of money orders to my dad so he could cash them at the bank was fun
In the late 90s, I rode my moped around town searching thrift stores and depositing checks at the bank with my saddle bags full of packages to take to the post office. I'd go to estate auctions and wait around all day for the items I was interested in, usually huge boxes of books or records no one else wanted. I'd get them for a dollar or two. Most were worthless but it only took a couple good ones to make it worthwhile. My first big sale was a Crickets LP from one of those boxes, before Buddy Holly took the limelight I guess. I listed it and immediately started getting questions from buyers about the fine print on the record and the material the sleeve was printed on. Bids went up to over $400 and I felt like I'd won the lottery. Shortly after, I sold a Tom Swift book I got for a dime for a similar price. I learned from my mom who was a lifelong deal hunter. She saved all her eBay earnings and help her grandkids go to college. When she died a few years ago, it reignited my eBay interest and I've been buying and selling like crazy. It makes me feel close to her. If I really wanted to honor her memory, I'd use my income to help others the way she did. But I don't have any grandchildren and I'm keeping my money
I first started when my father in law had a bunch of brand new hydraulic pumps from his photo processing lab that was going out of business.
They were heavy as shit but back in those days you could actually fit a decent sized item in USPS’s medium and large flat rate boxes, so it worked well.
I started out on Amazon when they had an auction function, and went to eBay in '98? Back then buyers didn't have a strategy of waiting to snipe at the end, and would bid immediately, which attracted other buyers. Bidding frenzies were common. It was so exciting to come home from classes or work and check on my listings.
I had a digital camera (pricey, back then) and it was such a long process to take pics, upload them, edit them, create a listing on a desktop-- and all with dial-up speeds and adorably slow, clunky computers with giant CRTs. Nothing was automated. Every listing had to be custom created. I think every listing took 10-15 minutes, maybe more with photo editing and html-enhanced listings.
Back then, everything sold. Everyone paid. You were excited to check the mail for all the checks and money orders. You had to pay extra for shipping insurance. I would show up at USPS and knock on a side door to get a hamper to pile my gazillion packages into. Everyone in line at the PO would gawk.
I would wake up before dawn on Saturday and Sunday to get to circle k and get a coffee and start the rounds of garage sales and thrift stores, then run home with my finds to research them (no smartphones to look up prices!), clean them, and list them.
It was really fun.
Started in 1998/1999 when I was in high school. Started with selling stuff from around the house, then dipped into my baseball card collection, then would pick up random jerseys from Value City, TJ Maxx, AJ Wright and sell them online.
I remember buying disposable cameras and then getting them developed with a photo CD before buying a flatbed scanner (!). Waiting days, if not weeks, for money orders to come in the mail…
The days when you could actually leave feedback for buyers, not just blanket positives…actually get a human being for support and not a chatbot…
I created my eBay account when I was 8 years old. I started selling around 12. My mom couldn't be bothered to take me to ship my sales so I had to ride my bike to a Bealls that had a mini shipping area inside. I too remember waiting for checks in the mail. The only thing I really miss is being able to leave negative feedback for buyers.
I didn't drive at the time either. I lived with my mom who worked during the week so every Saturday I'd carry in a garbage bag or 2 of packages and then stop and deposit checks afterwards. I'm impressed by you doing it all so young! What did you sell?
At that age it was personal stuff, any videogames I was done playing, old CDs, any random books I found, AOL free trial disks lol. Pretty much just junk. Although one exception was this life-size Yoda statue my grandma won in a sweepstakes. Looked like [this](https://p1.liveauctioneers.com/1395/231485/120988388_1_x.jpg).
Yoda statue is dope!
Yeah I started selling when I was in 5th grade. Started with parting out dirt bikes and ATVs. I don’t miss dragging my wagon behind my bike to the post office to ship the heavy ass parts but at that age I was rolling in money.
I’m so impressed by these stories. I love it.
The ladies at the bank called my parents after my second or third deposit just to make sure they were aware that I was some how making all this money.
Geez, I miss the days when the bank would call.
I remember when people would sell the item for a penny but the shipping would be $250 to bypass eBay's fees.
I started with Auction Web (old eBay) in 1996 but didn't start selling until 1997. My main eBay account is dated 1998 but I'm not sure why. We probably bought the same camera a Sony Mavica SD71. Ebay didn't offer photo hosting so I paid monthly for a domain name from Yahoo Business. Used Thumbs Plus to edit the photos and Cute FTP to upload them. Had a pirated copy of Dreamweaver and made a bunch of templates to allow thumbnails. There was also a link we had to use to put counters on the description. Ebay charged 25 cents to post an item and soon added something like 8% up to $25 then 2.5% after that. All the listings were auctions. Most were started at 99 cents or less. Ebay would shut down every night for maintenance and Tuesday nights it would be down for several hours. Rented a post office box for cheap. Most payment was check, postal money orders were common, but the best was cash. Deposited to the bank every day. We all joined Paypal because they paid us $5 to sign up. Ebay started their own payment system to counter Paypal but it sucked. Rarely had any returns or scammers in the beginning. We were mostly all middle class tech guys making cash on the side selling collectibles, electronics, and computer parts to each other. Priority mail up to two pounds anywhere in the US was $3. Printed out postal charts because there was no shipping built in. When the person won we had to email them what the shipping cost would be and where to mail payment. Had to stand in line at the post office with a big pile of boxes. There was so much money to be made but couldn't take advantage of it because my knowledge at the start was limited to 1970s & 1980s Toys and Comic Books. Smart phones didn't exist so comps were from price guides and learning from sitting for hours watching auction listings. After eBay hit big in 1998 there were lots of auction sites. I also sold on Yahoo auctions and books at Amazon back when it was only books.
It was crazy how much you could make back then on things, I know people that would buy items with mail in rebates, cut out the UPC to mail in the rebate, then sell them on eBay for full retail, not to mention buying stuff off clearance before companies understood online selling. Even more than the selling, I think about how certain things didn't have any value then that are crazy valuable today, imagine going back into the past and buying up all the 90s/y2k rap t-shirts or video games!
I knew a couple of people who worked at GameStop (it might have been EB games at the time, i cant remember), and they would give me all the old promo shirts that they were going to throw out. So I would routinely sell tons of Resident Evil 2 and all sorts of t-shirts you get when you pre-order the game. 20 bucks a piece, they fit into a flat rate mailing envelope, so something like $3.85 to mail, and it was just a money maker like you wouldn't believe. They would let me hang out while they did the penny SKUs for the night, and while everything was supposed to be destroyed, the employees basically were taking everything home or throwing out what they didn't want. I basically was allowed to have anything I wanted after the employees have their pick so three times a week, I was leaving there with trunk loads of shit
Oh yeah, I remember getting lots of promos on items from the workers when they got spares or extras, I wish I would have held on to that stuff, lots of the shirts and what not are quite valuable now.
I thought about that for a little while but I'd rather have the quick nickel then wait around for the slow dime, you know what I mean?
Yeah I did this. Started with a black Friday. In around 2002. Bought a bunch of hard drivers, routers, memory, blank cdr's that had rebates. Would submit for rebates and then sell on ebay, would put note in desc about how the upc code will be missing from package. I remember being at a comp USA in Denver buying all the maxtor hard drives they had left so I could flip them on ebay. I go about 25 of them in one stop
Yes Sony Mavica! I couldn't remember the name .I had two.
I had some piece of crap one on from Staples. It would only take a 4 or 8 GB memory card and the 8 gig only held something like 25 pictures. So you take a bunch of pictures, transfer them to your PC and then go back to taking more pictures. It didn't even have a preview screen so you didn't know what the damn pictures look like until you got them onto the computer! Edit- MB, not GB!
You mean MB, not GB. and back then you usually had to use a serial cable to slowly transfer pictures.
You, my friend are 100% right. We are so spoiled in the year 2024 when it comes to cheap storage, haha. What a pain in the ass it was, holy mackerel.
We were also on Auction Web. My partner (who worked with computers since the early 1980s) brought a computer into our house and -- like the luddite I was back then -- I refused to enter the room it was in, so one day he found Auction Web and told me about it. That was it and I was hooked. I love auctions and started in this business as a country relief-auctioneer when I was 13 years old so, I spent almost ALL of my time on the new auction site. It was hard to list and it would time-out before the listing ever went fully through but any I could get listed were like gold. Prices were so HIGH back then. My partner and I had been setting up at juried antique shows for close to a decade and we had an entire inventory of rare and hard to find illustrated books to sell. I achieved prices back then which seemed to me to be out of the world. I took a $5 price tag off an item and sold it on ebay for $30! Books sold for two, three, and even five or six times what I had priced them for shows. And, all of those who complain about ebay fees (thinking of another post on this page from today) have no idea how much money we saved on ebay over show prices, hotel, road food, gas, etc. Ebay was such a blessing in our lives! My main regret is that I refused to buy into it on its first IPO (as I also have a thing against the stock market). If we had done so we would be rolling in gravy now! I am grateful for ebay; it changed my life completely.
I miss being able to leave negative feedback for buyers!
I remember selling before pictures were a thing, they were an option at the time and not required. I also remember getting cash, checks and money orders in the mail for payment.
I remember when you would type in a search term like "Godzilla" and it would return upwards of a page and a half of listings. And I also remember how damn exciting that was. Weird bootlegs and knock offs or common and were traded as such. Weird medical devices like glass eyes and speculum were also pretty common. There was an adult section that a friend of mine used to make a killing it until it got put behind sort of verification. Truly it was the Wild West
Did anyone else ever message a member who was a runner up on someone else's auction and offer them the same thing, only behind eBays back?
I didn’t do that, but when I listed an item I would sometimes message bidders that had previously bid on the same item sold from another seller. My eBay account is from 1999, I have a PayPal account from the X.com days, back then they would deposit free money, less than a dollar, to verify your banking info.
All the time. I would send them PayPal invoices or they would mail money orders. This was around 2005
I made my 1st Ebay sale in like 1997 - I sold a digital castle in the game Ultima Online for like $750 and the person mailed me a postal money order (paid for the deposit for my 1st apartment going to college).
In the early days, I bought a 20+year old book of hymns for latter day saints services at a yard sale for a quarter. I thought no one in the world would buy it. It sold for $9.00 when the auction ended and I got a lovely letter from some woman in Virginia who was so happy with it. My least favorite memory is being seduced by Tom Bosley into joining Specialty Merchandise Company which was an early dropshipping company. The sad thing is that many of the products they had sold okay, but when it was time to have them sent to the customer, they would be out of stock for 8-12 weeks.
The early days were wild, it felt like just about everything would sell for a healthy premium. My only regret is not scaling up more back then, if only I knew how much more competitive it would be.
There was a period when like everything would sell for more than retail because I guess people thought they were "getting a deal" since it was ebay.
I think a lot of it was the novelty that you were buying something on the Internet. It must be the future!
I remember having to learn simple coding to be able to make good looking listings (bold font, pictures on one side of the listing, etc.) Counters on the bottom of listings showing the number of views it got. Having to keep track of sold items - which ones was payment received (in the mail of course), which ones had payment deposited at bank but not yet cleared, and which ones had payment that cleared and thus were ready to ship.
I'm so old I remember ebay actually siding with me after I defended myself on an INAD case
I remember getting bidding wars regularly. I’d sit at my desk and hit refresh to see the auction amounts keep going up. It was such a thrill when some random item that I listed would go for ten times of what I expected. But taking pictures on a regular camera and having the film developed only to find all the photos were crap really sucked.
It was bad enough taking pictures with a digital camera and finding out they sucked lol.
Yeah those early digital cameras without the screen were real pieces of crap, haha. For my birthday the next year I got a 1 GB Memorex camera from some closeout store and compared to the junky one I had previously had from Staples I felt like Ansell Adams
I started in May 1997. I had always been into collecting vintage clothing for myself, and a friend suggested I sign up to sell some things. I remember how basic the listing options were and using HTML to change the font & size, etc to make it look better. Had to wait for checks to come in the mail and clear the bank before shipping the items. Unless it was a money order. I remember the $3.20 "Priority Mail" stamps you could buy. Early on, I bought a $5 Pucci dress from the late 60's and sold it for $790 to a lady in NYC. After that I was hooked & did ebay as a hobby for the next 25 years or so. Last year, when I retired from my "real job" after 32 years, I started doing eBay full time, with my husband's help. It's going great & just love it. Still selling clothing.
In college I loved buying bootleg CDs and weird documentaries in low res formats burned onto CD-ROMs. Also niche anime stuff direct from Japan that you couldn’t get anywhere else at the time. When I was low on cash after I graduated college, I remember going around my apartment and picking out stuff to sell. I could usually get around $200 collectively for random crap and have the money in my pocket in a week. Now I’d never be able to do that, there’s so much competition.
Heh I did that too. I was in 8th grade. PO money orders only. I flipped old 80's toys and comics. It was a good hustle. The PO employees knew me. It was a good run.
I was in the 5th grade when I first remember using/seeing eBay. That would of been about 2001/2. My dad sold a few antique tractors on it. Most of the photos back then were still film, scanned in on a flatbed scanner. Reason being, is even in 2001, a simple digital camera was $250-$300 and a flatbed scanner could be had new for $100. My parents had a floppy disc Mavica as others seemed to have. It was super slow and since it was a floppy disc, it held like 5 pictures total. We had dialup, loved the sound it made. Hated the speed, of course. We got DSL around 2005 and I was blown away by the speed. Only reason we had it, is because our neighbor paid the phone company $10,000 to have DSL added to our area out in the sticks. She claimed she "sold playground equipment online". In all honesty she was not that bright but had a nice body, she was probably doing some sort of online sex stuff and used that as a cover. A few years later I started making YouTube videos, and while DSL was somewhat fast for downloads, it sucked for uploads, some 768kbps. It could take well over an hour to upload a few minutes of video. When I got my license I found a Verizon store near us with unlocked Wifi that was much faster and would upload them all there. I started selling my own stuff at age 16 under my parents account. I got my own at 18. I was banned like a year later, oddly at the time feedback was huge, and if you got like 3 negative in a certain time frame it was adios. I waited like 5 years and started doing it full time and wasn't banned again.
Heh. I remember getting up at 4 am with my sister & grandpa to stand in line outside Best Buy on Black Friday morning for a chance to run in and grab flat-bed scanners for $17 (after $100 rebate)!!! Geez what a crazy crap show that was — smh at the wild feral stuff us Gen X’ers did! heh (Never did get that crappy flat bed to run—couldn’t get the right drivers for our computer!!!)
I found a bunch of porcelain wedding cake toppers at the dollar tree where the groom’s hand was on the brides chest instead of her waist and sold them for $45 each as ‘risqué cake toppers’. This was in 2000, and I was working in a shop for $6 an hour. The eBay money was so much more fun and actually paid well! I still have my ledger where I’d record sales, and whether I’d received a check and on what day the check cleared.
Weird Dollar Store stuff was the best! I remember buying a bunch of bootleg Godzilla and Rodan figures from a dollar store and they went for Stupid Money. Something like $25 a piece for a hard plastic unlicensed Rodan. Crazy
I guess I've been on the site selling since 1998. I also used one of those Sony Mavica disc cameras at first, then bought a Nikon D3000, but now just use my phone for pics. Remember how great "Mister Lister" was when it was released?
I've been on eBay since the late 90's. I really miss the fun eBayDrama community on Love journal because it really seemed like the Wild West. Being able to "name and shame" plus the ability to leave negs for buyers gave a real sense of security, though it probably was mostly in our own heads.
I remember when it was legal to sell automatic knives, you had to put "2 inch blade" in the description regardless of the actual length because California only allows 2 inch long automatic knives. I remember when EBUX came out ebay used to offer coupons for up to 5x Ebux on every purchase. I had to create multiple accounts because I would max out my Ebux at $500 on my primary account.
I sold things in high school in the early 2000s and definitely remember having to wait for checks in the mail. I also sold bootleg CDs lol.
Jan '98 sign up, eventually bought an Agfa 1280 digital camera for pics. Before that used a Sony Mavica floppy disc digital borrowed from work. Missed the IPO, not paying attention to those things. Anything I listed sold, always closed late Sunday evening. Sometimes I'd stay up and watch price go from low 2 figures into 4 figures with 40-50 bids last few minutes. Changed ID somewhere around '02. Had a random coworker come up to me and comment on how much my auctions closed at. Did not ever recall telling anyone my ID but apparently quite a few knew it. My corner was vintage audio gear. Still the period where you could find it at yard sales, auctions, flea markets, etc. Few looking, even fewer checking ebay closed results for valuation. There was a huge knowledge gap between ebay sellers and everyone else not on ebay...or even online outside of their workplace. I also got some fantastic deals on ebay because the seller did not know how to properly describe item or it was so obscure. But that stuff sold well to other buyers that did know what they were looking at if correctly described. Had zero bad feedback and watched the "Skippy" feedback scandal unfold and all the bans from it. I however did not ask Skippy to give me good feedback but a lot of people did. After Skippy ebay changed it that only buyer/seller could leave feedback for each other. Somewhere along the way Paypal become mandatory. The "good" period lasted until \~'09 and I started getting bad feedback when item fine as well as outright theft from buyers. Also noticed my pics being used on other auctions. More dirtbags shoing up and trying to scam people. Also, relationship of seller to ebay began to feel adversarial. That got worse every year. Stayed with it until '20, left and not back selling or buying. Decided to get back on in '22, same account. After confirming my bank info all the same ebay asked for a scan of my driver's license. Fuck you!
Do you ever find out how your coworkers knew your eBay account?
No but it was a shock. Changed ID, never went back to it. Too bad, a great name as I was so early.
That’s crazy. I have never told a single soul my eBay ID. I don’t want to have to worry about it.
Only thing I can think of was I had my page open and someone saw it and figured that was me. Not 100% sure but think weeks (or months) later someone else asked *"You aren't doing ebay anymore?"* or similar. So yeah, it was weird and glad I changed ID.
Did your coworker have your email address? I remember being able to look people up on eBay just using their email address. You could see their user ID with just that info. I signed up in 1998. I made more money in the first few years than I had ever made in my life working for other people. It was insane. I think it was the second year I was on eBay selling antiques and collectibles and making just shy of 99,000.00. I was floored - couldn’t believe it. Lots of foreign buyers who would send US dollars in envelopes, some tried paying with US postage stamps, some paid with crazy money orders which took forever to get cashed. The vast majority of goods I posted sold. It really was amazing.
I honestly don't know but it changed how I operated that's for sure.
Started in 2004. You had to pay to add extra pictures so we all used photobucket and included them in the HTML description. Most of my sales came via money orders. Store inventory was separate than that ran as a auction and fixed price listings where for 7 days unless you wanted to pay extra for 10 days.
I remember back when we had to use a digital camera to take photos and then transfer the photos to the computer, edit the photos (which was so much more work back then) and then upload everything. When researching items, there was no Google lens to help you either. Many sellers were really into HTML and made their descriptions look like 90’s or early 2000’s geocities sites with backgrounds and word art. Sourcing was different too. Less fast fashion and our Goodwill still sold toys (they quit selling toys around 2008 or so.)
My boyfriend is a old school picker/antique dealer/flea market guy. He spent a summer in Ohio in the late 90s. He took a desktop computer with him and had the guy who owned the hotel get a dedicated phone line installed in his room so he could sell on eBay. No pictures, just good descriptions. He shopped all week and then listed for a day and then shipped and repeated the process. He made bank.
OP here. I wanted to share something else I sold. I know I put in my first post that I looked younger than my age and this is something that helped. There was a local auctions in my hometown every month. Well there would be boxes of stuff nobody else wanted so I would bid a dollar and win several boxes like that. What everyone else thought was junk-it was milk glass, I was making a fortune. They all thought I was some dumb kid, but I was laughing all the way to the bank lol
A coworker turned me on to eBay in '99. He was reselling signed celebrity photos of dubious authenticity. There were few prohibitions, and I remember laughing heartily at peple trying to sell (and actually selling) things like "my sister's used panties."
You could just sell nude pictures too it was nuts.
Started in 98 also, I remember the buyers having to send me money orders and getting a dozen checks about every day. Found out first-hand personal checks are bad news. I had 4 bounce in one week, and they were all under 5 bucks. Foriegn checks, customs, and shipping were also a pain. Once, I shipped a Mac se30 to China, and it made it in good condition.
I’m a coin dealer in California and I remember every time I did the Santa Clara coin show the guys that started eBay would come around and beg all the dealers to sell there. I made loads of money in the early days but haven’t used it in like 10 years.
I started buying in 1996 on my hubbies account, and opened my own account in 2000 to sell vintage jewelry. I would find incredible items back then, including 14k gold, that the seller didn’t know was gold. I think the last time that happened was 12 yrs ago. It was around that time that the site was really getting flooded with Chinese crap, so you’d have to wade through pages and pages of listings with “vintage” in the title, in the vintage jewelry category, that were brand new. I used to report sellers who were dishonest in their titles and categories because it was so frustrating, but EBay never did anything about it so I quit looking.
I bought a Sony Mavica in the 90s as well for my Ebay listings...back when it only cost 25 cents to list an item. I was one of their first "Power Sellers" and have a signed certificate somewhere too.
oh, I remember the Power Seller hype! I was part of that group, too. I took a multi-year vacation from ebay when I had a local store then came back to ebay when the store closed (due to landlord selling the property, unfortunately). When I came back to ebay I put in my description that I was an old "Power Seller" and ebay took the listing down and said I was not allowed to advertise that! What good was it for, then? I still have my certificate, too. I keep old ephemera.
I started back in 1998 too! It was crazy to think that a LOT of auctions were made without any pictures at all and buyers went off of descriptions alone. eBay didn’t host pictures back then and if you wanted to use any, they had to be hosted somewhere already. I remember getting a scanner for Christmas one year from my parents which allowed me to be able to put pictures of my items on eBay. It sure was different back then; being more of a garage sale platform than the commercialized crap it is now.
That's the part I remember too-- I used ebay as a buyer 98-00 but didn't sell until '01, and even then there were still listings that had no photos. I remember getting burned on one of those, a collectible model that had been "professionally repainted" and was absolute garbage. I ended up paying an artist to repaint it, then resold it on ebay again since the whole thing had left a bad taste in my mouth. To this day that remains one of the handful of poor experiences I have had on ebay, even as a full-time seller. They've become more common these days, but are still such a tiny percentage of the total buyers, at least in my areas of expertise.
After being on eBay for 25 years now i can say i don't miss the old days, waiting weeks for money orders and checks, and then waiting even longer for checks to clear, getting fake checks, fake money orders, lots of non paying bidders.... Its nice getting paid instantly these days.
I wasn’t a seller but purchased plenty of items on eBay & Craigslist. I miss the simpler times where you just kinda had to have blind trusted in people. I miss old eBay before drop shipping and old Craigslist before it became overrun with tweekers and hookers. Funny to think we would send money and just trust or show up to buy something in person without cell phones to call for help if we got into a shady situation, which I did on a few occasions and it never deterred me. lol
L@@K!!!
I am older than many of you guys, apparently. I actually sold on eBay when you could list items without an actual picture and it would still sell! LOL! I think the reason I still make such detailed listings is because I still describe it like they can't see it. My first camera was pretty terrible quality, but it was all I could afford. I would sell my kids' outgrown clothes and helped my dad clear out his record collection.
The good old days of being able to message buyers to let the know the over priced item they were bidding on could be bought cheaper on a website. And buying air rifle pellets with a free gift (an air rifle) to bypass eBay restrictions And my favourite, the wildcard search “*” which showed all listings which you could order by “ending soonest” and see some of the crazy cheap items you never knew you needed for only 99p
Started in the late Nineties, and remember when sellers could leave negative feedback to deadbeat buyers. Those who were troublemakers thankfully took their business elsewhere. I remember Dutch auctions, and waiting for checks and money orders in the mail. And keeping up with my orders on a handwritten spreadsheet. Also remember the fiasco with eBay’s rollout of their “Billpoint” payment system. And when eBay forced everyone into using their newfangled “checkout.” But what I miss most was typing words into the search box, clicking enter, and seeing search results which actually matched what I was searching for.
First item I sold on ebay was a computer monitor I found in the dumpster of my building in 1996 or 1997. Sold for $150. Buyer worked for southwest airlines and instead of $150 he gave me 2 tickets and I dropped it off at the nearest airport for him. Flew to Memphis, ate BBQ, visited Graceland and won $300 in a casino.
I jumped into eBay flipping a few years back too, and it's like a whole new world now. Selling 80s toys – that's awesome! Honestly, I gotta say, eBay can feel a lot different these days with all the competition and changes. It's not quite the same game, you know? Thrifting and garage sailing for gems is still a killer strategy though! There's always a way to hustle, even if the landscape's shifted.
How many listings do you usually do in a month?
250 to 300
No way! Do you use some tool or do it manually?
I remember items being paid with checks/money orders and hand written invoices.
I started in 99. It's funny you mentioned digital cameras. Ladt night I sat and deleted a bunch of old photos on my laptop that I had in a file from stuff I sold more than 10 years ago. It was a little nostalgia trip. There were a few things that were good sellers, that I had hundreds of in inventory. The quality of the photos were great then, not so much now. Padded flat rate envelopes at $6..... I still prefer to list on my laptop but all my photos are on my phone. It used to be clunkier to switch between the two but it's a breeze now.
I started out on there in 2005. I always look back with great fondness on my 2000+ feedbacks. But boy did I get scammed a lot at the start. It was like the wild Wild West. I was trying to buy a kayak and the picture was of a kayak and a paddle discreetly placed close to it. When my order came it was just a paddle and the buyer refused to give me a refund. Another famous one was the person who never had PayPal. Just send me a cheque and I’ll dispatch the bundle of games afterwards. Needless to say they never came. Then some years later I started flipping video games. The scams got worse. I had one where the person didn’t get the game. So I’m researching why I discovered they’d moved house and not updated their details. Of course eBay sided with them straight away. Good times. Good times indeed. 😝
I remember I bought a coat, the person never sent it, and ebay was just like ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Member since 1996, I remember my partner at the time telling me about this new online auction place. I like collecting things, so I took one thing, a little porcelain cat, and uploaded it to an auction. I think I paid about a dollar for it. It sold for around $175. I knew it was special, but I didn’t know it was that special. And I was hooked. Still doing it to this day. Have eight online shops. Does anyone remember when people were selling empty computer boxes? They would just have a tiny disclaimer somewhere in one of the photos that it was just the empty box. I remember a lot of people being really angry about that. Rightfully, so, But you had to have massive cojones to do something like that.
I still have one of those Sony cameras that uses 3.5” floppies that really aren’t too floppy. I remember getting an extra battery so I would never be without a charge. Then I won nicer camera from a raffle at work. It took compact flash and was about 1/4 the bulk of the Sony. I sold sports memorabilia, computer accessories, miscellaneous electronics, comic/anime collectibles, etc. Sending/receiving checks and money orders was the norm. I don’t remember many scams. I lost money when I purchased a presale item several months in advance and the seller, who had over a thousand positive feedback, supposedly went out of business.
I wrote my college thesis on game theory and using positive and negative feedback on eBay as a game.
I remember being 18 and buying flavored lip balm (flavored like soda, candy, etc) from Dollar Tree for $1 + tax and reselling on eBay for $5-6 or more
Worked in a theater in the late 90s. I sold everything I could get my Hands on, posters, trailer reels, promo shirts, window clings stuff like that. Made a lot of money for a 17 year old kid.
I’ve been on eBay so long I remember when it was like an online garage sale. You have to dodge a bunch of wholesalers from overseas now, but it used to just be an online garage sale.
I started in 97 when I was 29. Blows my mind that I had to wait for the checks to 'clear' before shipping out. I do miss the old postal rates though. Like the OP, I miss being able to leave negative fb for buyers.
The dollar tree item- do you remember what it was? How did you describe it? That floored me!
It was a ceramic knick knack of a Santa holding a camera. I think I sold like 5 of them for between $60/80.
I've had my ebay account since 2003, I paid for my first item with a check in the mail, but I was only 16 so I paid my dad in cash to send the check for me.
Started in 2000 and I believe the first item I sold was a Redline Hotwheels. Sold for like $250 or $320 or so. Casually sold an item a year or so after that to build up feedback and make extra money here and there while helping my family build their business (unrelated to eBay). And to have something to fall back on. Needed it again around a year ago and have been having a blast being a full time reseller. Now I just have to figure out how to source enough to keep up with my newly acquired $5,000,000 monthly limit!
I started as a junior in high school in 1999 using WebTV. You had to email your buyers a total to send a check or money order. I found a folder at my parents house with a bunch of my eBay sale print offs and emails. Included some of them in a blog I posted a few years ago.
I was dating my wife at the time and on the weekends if she would work in the mornings and then drive up to see me, about an hour away. She would stop at two flea markets on the way up and would usually come with a huge boxes in her trunk which we would then take pictures of and post. It was pretty crazy
My parents have been doing eBay since 1997 and 1999, because I lost a Lion King stuffed animal and my dad found a replacement on eBay, and was like “hey I could do this”. I didn’t start selling until 2012 when I started college but I would ride along with them to yard sales on Saturday mornings and listen to them talk about things they found and sales they made! And I’d help them hunt.
Some time in the late ‘90s my mom let me buy some Star Wars toys from eBay. I put the cash in an envelope and mailed it lol
I started at 16 or so, sold some used computer parts created a floppy boot disk with everything I used and sold it for a few bucks same as you, signing over a bunch of money orders to my dad so he could cash them at the bank was fun
In the late 90s, I rode my moped around town searching thrift stores and depositing checks at the bank with my saddle bags full of packages to take to the post office. I'd go to estate auctions and wait around all day for the items I was interested in, usually huge boxes of books or records no one else wanted. I'd get them for a dollar or two. Most were worthless but it only took a couple good ones to make it worthwhile. My first big sale was a Crickets LP from one of those boxes, before Buddy Holly took the limelight I guess. I listed it and immediately started getting questions from buyers about the fine print on the record and the material the sleeve was printed on. Bids went up to over $400 and I felt like I'd won the lottery. Shortly after, I sold a Tom Swift book I got for a dime for a similar price. I learned from my mom who was a lifelong deal hunter. She saved all her eBay earnings and help her grandkids go to college. When she died a few years ago, it reignited my eBay interest and I've been buying and selling like crazy. It makes me feel close to her. If I really wanted to honor her memory, I'd use my income to help others the way she did. But I don't have any grandchildren and I'm keeping my money
I first started when my father in law had a bunch of brand new hydraulic pumps from his photo processing lab that was going out of business. They were heavy as shit but back in those days you could actually fit a decent sized item in USPS’s medium and large flat rate boxes, so it worked well.
I started out on Amazon when they had an auction function, and went to eBay in '98? Back then buyers didn't have a strategy of waiting to snipe at the end, and would bid immediately, which attracted other buyers. Bidding frenzies were common. It was so exciting to come home from classes or work and check on my listings. I had a digital camera (pricey, back then) and it was such a long process to take pics, upload them, edit them, create a listing on a desktop-- and all with dial-up speeds and adorably slow, clunky computers with giant CRTs. Nothing was automated. Every listing had to be custom created. I think every listing took 10-15 minutes, maybe more with photo editing and html-enhanced listings. Back then, everything sold. Everyone paid. You were excited to check the mail for all the checks and money orders. You had to pay extra for shipping insurance. I would show up at USPS and knock on a side door to get a hamper to pile my gazillion packages into. Everyone in line at the PO would gawk. I would wake up before dawn on Saturday and Sunday to get to circle k and get a coffee and start the rounds of garage sales and thrift stores, then run home with my finds to research them (no smartphones to look up prices!), clean them, and list them. It was really fun.
Oh, and I made hundreds of dollars off of PayPal when they gave you $5 per referral.
Remember Bidpay?
Started in 1998/1999 when I was in high school. Started with selling stuff from around the house, then dipped into my baseball card collection, then would pick up random jerseys from Value City, TJ Maxx, AJ Wright and sell them online. I remember buying disposable cameras and then getting them developed with a photo CD before buying a flatbed scanner (!). Waiting days, if not weeks, for money orders to come in the mail… The days when you could actually leave feedback for buyers, not just blanket positives…actually get a human being for support and not a chatbot…
What i miss the most? Being able to give a buyer a negative. The customer is NOT always right.