Today is my fifteenth anniversary at eBay. I had discovered the site in a hotel room using something called Lodgenet (which I think was Webtv for hotels). I knew right away I had to get involved.
I used to run little classified ads in Linn’s Stamp News and enjoyed the trading I did in collectible stamps there, but THIS let a guy use pictures and more words and reach a “worldwide” audience.
Of course, I didn’t have a digital camera, so the pictures were out, and I had to rely on just text, but that’s another story.
After the hotel stay, the following Monday I hightailed it over to the Spencer Public Library since I didn’t have a computer, and used theirs to register. Dewey The Cat, later to be the subject of a New York Times best selling book, watched me do that.
Pick a user name, the thing said. I’m a fan of a band called the Grateful Dead and they had a song called St. Stephen which has a line that goes “one man gathers what another man spills”. I thought that probably fit nicely, so I chose “saintsteven”, a play on my name and that song. It took. I was later to lose the name and had to adopt a variation, but that’s yet another story.
For the first few weeks or maybe months, I was a buyer. I had a little indie record store and I discovered right away that I could buy low at eBay and sell high at the store. The record business is like that, full of folklore about what’s rare and what isn’t. Some titles that sold well in Spencer were plentiful on the internet at low prices. Mason Proffit’s album Wanted comes to mind. It was a hot number in Iowa due to their appearance once at the Wadena Rock Festival, but not particularly difficult to run down at seven or eight dollars at eBay, and it regularly commanded twenty-five in my bins.
One day it occurred to me that *I* could do this stuff. I had records that were picked over and unsold, and I listed a box of bluegrass records at some low price because I couldn’t get a nickel for them in my outlaw hard rock store. Wham! Seventy-some dollars, as I recall. I photographed that guy’s check, minus his contact info and framed it. First Internet dollar.
Since I couldn’t use photos, I had to rely on crafty text, and I didn’t mind that challenge one bit. It became my daily routine to do several write-ups at my store, close it for a few minutes and run over to the library to post the new listings. Stuff sold. You could sell anything there, even though eBay was already four years old. The novelty was powerful.
Eventually the library figured it out, thanks to a newspaper article about the guy who augmented his store sales with this Internet stuff. Dewey The Cat’s author sidled up to me one day while I was posting and said “we couldn’t help but notice that nice article about you in the newspaper”.
I thanked her, thinking that was nice, when she mentioned “But you can’t do that here. Our computers are not for commercial use”. I promised not to do that anymore, trying to figure out a go-around, and the next day when I popped in to check my email, they made it obvious they intended to enforce that rule by peering over my shoulder while I was computing.
I HAD acquired a Webtv unit by that time, or rather, my girlfriend had, but I had to travel forty miles to use it.
Miraculously, Bruce from the Beehive appeared at my counter one day and GAVE me an obsolete computer that was good enough to list via a tool called MisterLister (and a dial up connection), and I could drive the 40 miles and start that stuff in the evening, which I felt was the optimum time to start and end auctions.
That went on for a long time, although he eventually did want that computer back so he could give it to a grand kid. I broke down and rented one, continuing to use the dial up. I probably had a thousand “feed backs” already by that time.
This version is going to leave out a lot of fun details, because I want to compare THAT eBay to today’s eBay.
It was the wild, wild west. Almost anything went. Feedback might have been the backbone of the system, but it wasn’t the stick and carrot that it is today. The unexpected part for me was the community aspect. It wasn’t efficient for me to use the chat boards and the discussion boards while I had a half hour at the library and it took me a while to discover that community. But one Saturday night I saw Alicia Keys (September 29, 2001) and I thought she was pretty good, so I made my first post on the Music Board. It didn’t take long for one of the regulars there to tell me Alica Keys was terrible. That fascinated me and I vowed to not let him get away with that. Eventually we became fast friends, ultimately meeting at West Bend where he and his wife were traveling on a vacation that included lots of visits to rock places (the geologic kind, not the music kind).
But back to then versus now. There was no PayPal. There WAS the ubiquitous feedback, but it wasn’t as detailed as it is today and it was really ONLY for the buyer to assess a seller (and vice versa), not a weapon for The Venue to control sellers’ behavior.
There were no Buy It Nows, no Stores. And for me, no pictures, although I did eventually figure out how to get my film digitized (thank you Seattle Filmworks), so if you could write cleverly, it was a powerful tool. I specialized in thorough descriptions with a large pinch of irreverence, often making light fun of the Thing I was selling.
It worked. I was in heaven. I sold records, CD’s, other commercial stuff I could replace through the store’s vendors and even sticks and rocks and found objects, and even the styrofoam packing peanuts some of my shipments were packed in.
Eventually, by 2001, my online sales outstripped my counter sales. I made that fateful decision: pack up the store and take it all home, which I did early in 2002.
From that point, things became a little less fun. Kind of serious, in fact, since the mortgage payment and grocery bill now relied strictly on those sales and my supply of record collections that USED to walk through the door weekly dried up.
Still, it worked, and I racked up around a thousand feed backs a year.
Things loped along until 2008. Then something terrible happened. Management at eBay changed. I had sold my house and moved three years prior to that because the bank was getting a little uptight about me and my late payments, and I had also launched my own site at the same time. Good thing too, because the new management (hired from Bain & Co), hated the “flea market”.
I have never figured out how he got the stockholders to embrace that concept, but he did. They began tightening down the screws. I had created an eBay Store, with some 750 items, mostly because they made it incredibly attractive to do that, but it didn’t take very long for them to create a buyer-vs-seller dichotomy. New rules upon rules became rampant, fee structures bounced around wildly, and by 2010, The Purge was in full swing. Whatever seemed broken to insiders at eBay was the sellers’ faults. I found myself violating rule after rule that I had never heard of, even though I never did (even to this day) anger any buyers badly enough to draw a “negative”. Well, yes, there WERE a couple of negatives, but they were from kooks and kids and I managed to get them removed.
By the Fall of 2010, it had become intolerable and I closed the store, moved it to my own site and never regretted that. I did continue to list, even to this day, because I had a partner feeding me antiques to sell and paying me a commission for those sales that I didn’t care to give up. But I stopped enjoying it-it had become a “business”, the thing I was trying to avoid. I was trying to have a good time.
It’s been love/hate since then. Even though us sellers are the scourge of the site, somehow endangering the executives’ multimillion dollar deals, I’ve continued, but these days I have to drag myself to the keyboard to do it. I’m not crazy; I don’t want to walk away from the money, which in reality is so far below poverty level that I qualify for all kinds of government assistance I don’t actually use.
It looks a LITTLE like they might lighten up a bit this year. Now those of us who sell “collectibles” have a new deal, and now we have SOME protection against rogue feed back which increased dramatically when sellers could only leave buyers one kind (good). I have long wondered why sellers can leave any feed back at all, and I’ll bet money by next January that they won’t be able to. That’s fine, it’s a pain to meticulously go in there and leave every trading partner the same thing. I’ve used canned feed back for years and years now, since it’s meaningless when it’s from seller.
eBay seemed so obsessed with becoming Amazon Junior that I’ve flirted with Amazon for several years now, cutting out the middleman. Amazon has never hard-assed me at all, except I can’t sell toys during Christmas time because I don’t have enough of a track record.
But my real love is my own site, saintstevensthingery.com. Too bad I’m not a better code writer, it’s not real flashy, but it does some business. And it doesn’t concentrate on commodity junk like both eBay and Amazon do. Personally more fulfilling.
I owe eBay a lot, mostly from eye-opening. It’s a bigger world out there than I had ever imagined. If Mason Proffit’s album never WAS particularly hard-to-find, it’s also true that Things mundane to American me are quite highly sought by International buyers. Today, since I’m actually retired, the money thing is not very important anymore, but the citizen-of-the-world thing is priceless.
I’ll probably continue at eBay, at least as long as my partner in antiques wants to, but at least for this horse, the carrot and stick technique just isn’t going to work anymore.
I didn’t even thoroughly read the August update, where they start punishing people for “defects” that drive buyers from THEIR site. Their site was not built by committees and lawyers, it was built by guys like me. They can have what it has become. I thought I ran away from that once anyway, when I bailed from the brick-and-mortar and the landlord.
Like Neil Young said in his album Greendale,
Got to get past
The negative thing
The lawyers and business
You get what you bring
No one’s sorry
You did it yourself
It’s time to relax now
And then give it hell