SMALL BUSINESS PROFILE
Millions cashing in online on eBay
By Mary Chao
Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle
 |
| Debi Waldman sells items such as this collection of "Superfriends" drinking glasses on eBay, as well as antiques she buys at garage and estate sales. In 2000, she sold $38,000 worth of merchandise on eBay.
Gannett News Service |
Then she discovered a way to get her goods in front of customers around the world without ever leaving her Brighton, N.Y., home. She offers it for sale on eBay, the Internet's largest online auction site.
"I thought I could do it from home and I could get more customers," Rab said.
Rab is among millions of entrepreneurs who are cashing in on eBay. Some make their living off the site; others just pick up some extra income.
Launched in 1995, eBay initially attracted mostly collectors or people looking to buy electronic parts. But in 1998 — the year it became a publicly traded company — eBay had 600,000 registered users. And it has grown steadily each year.
EBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said that 93 percent of the site's transactions are among individuals or small businesses selling more than $9 billion worth of goods annually. The site, which has 85 percent to 90 percent of the online auction market, offers 18,000 categories of goods — everything from clothing to art, from homes to home computers.
Small-business owners such as Rab say eBay is an inexpensive way to reach an international audience of about 49 million potential customers.
Sellers must invest in the tools of the trade — a personal computer, a digital camera to photograph your wares, a scanner to input photographs and an Internet connection. And there are tools to make working on eBay easier, such as bulk listing or auction management software, which costs between $65 and $250.
To list items on eBay, the seller must pay a fee, which ranges from 30 cents on items selling for under $10 to $3.30 for items costing more than $200. And there are additional fees ranging from 1.5 percent to 5 percent of the item's selling price. EBay would not disclose its median auction price.
Then there's getting paid. Many eBay merchants accept Pay Pal, a service in which buyers register their credit card or checking accounts with eBay, which then forwards the sale amount to the vendor. Other eBay sellers take personal checks or money orders.
Many people work part time at online selling. Those who want a full-time income have to put in full-time hours, monitoring the site to respond to potential buyers, said Georgia Giummarra, who teaches about selling on eBay at a local community education center.
"With full-time effort, a person can earn $40,000 or more annually," Giummarra said. "But this is not something you can dabble in. To make a full-time living, you have to work eight to 10 hours a day."
The online auction industry has unlimited growth potential because it offers so many hard-to-find items that are bound to appeal to someone's tastes, said Hemant Sashittal, chairman of the management department at St. John Fisher College in Rochester.
"People have an insatiable appetite to buy things," Sashittal said. "When they buy on eBay, they act out their fantasies."
Debi Waldman initially started selling items on eBay as a way to clean out her attic. The Charlotte, N.Y., resident made hundreds of dollars — including $253 for an old Beatles 45 record with the band's name misspelled — in her first sale four years ago.
The experience paid off.
After she lost her accounting job in 1999, Waldman, 46, found in the classified ads a collection of 1,929 pieces of pink Depression glass, which she purchased for $6,000. Over a year, she sold the collection piece by piece on eBay, earning more than $22,000. Coupled with selling other antiques she found at garage and estate sales, Waldman sold $38,000 worth of merchandise on eBay in 2000.
Rab teaches math and physics part time at Rochester Institute of Technology, but she hopes to eventually make selling on eBay a full-time business. She has reinvested much of the money from eBay sales into the business, hiring a consultant to help design a Web page and maintain a virtual store.
Rab found selling on eBay much more effective than traditional retailing. She is now able to sell her line, called Heera Fashions, without the hassle of traveling and setting up for shows or paying for retail space.
"I like it much better," she said.
