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June 24, 2005
You can sell anything on eBay
I was trying to find the checkbook at the end of the month to write the rent check and stumbled across a pack of twelve drink coupons for Southwest airlines. (They come with a Rapid Rewards voucher). You can trade them for beer or wine (three coupons) or mixed drinks (four coupons) instead of paying $3 or $4 to go along with your two packs of dry (or, if you're lucky, honey) roasted peanuts. Since I always ask for orange juice and my girlfriend nearly always gets ginger ale, I thought I might as well chuck them out. But then I had a crazy idea - maybe I could sell them on eBay.
I asked my woman how much I should sell them for and she told me to get off the computer for the 3rd time in the last 20 minutes and take out the trash, so I knew I had to come up with something fast. I logged onto eBay (I had bought some Steve Kerr basketball cards a couple of years ago and remarkably remembered my userid) and searched for Southwest airline drink coupons.
I couldn't believe it when about 20 listings came up for this exact same thing. So I copied and pasted someone else's picture, wrote up three short sentences, and listed them for $0.75. eBay charged the credit card $0.35.
I took out the trash and when I came back in five minutes I was disappointed to find out that no one had bid on them. After hitting "refresh" about 100 times in the next 10 minutes and not even seeing the free counter indicate someone had looked at them, I gave up and went to bed thinking my $0.35 listing fee was down the drain.
The next morning, I had two bids and the price was up to $2.51! Crazy, I thought. When I came home from work to check again (okay, okay, I might've checked the price at work a couple times), the bid was an astounding $3.76. I couldn't believe people would actually (1) search for drink coupons and (2) buy them in order to save a few bucks on something they could buy for half the price anyway by hitting the grocery store before the airport and carrying in their purse/briefcase/backpack.
Once the bid hit $5.26, I was positively beaming. I had to say my girlfriend was mildly impressed with my entrepreneurismship. Anyway, it closed two days later at $7.51 plus $1.00 for shipping (which, I'm happy to say, I refunded to the bidder, who I slightly felt sorry for, since all I had to do was plop the coupons into an envelope and slap on a stamp). Taking out the price of the 37 cent stamp and eBay's cut, I made $6.79. Oh yeah, that's TAX-FREE money, baby.
Now I'm looking at some of the other junk clogging up the drawer with the checkbook and trying to figure out if anyone will buy some unopened packs of Post-It notes or eight pre-sharpened No. 2 pencils held together sturdily with a fully-functional, genuine rubber band.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6540872984&ssPageName=ADME:B:EOAS:US:3
Posted by brian at June 24, 2005 08:31 PM
Comments
Great story - wonder if that'll work in England? Apparently, people are getting addicted to Ebay. They just like the thrill of winning the auction! I get lots of stuff cheap - but free - must be something free - that'll sell on Ebay (UK). Thanks for the suggestion, anyway, given me something to think about. Along the same lines - just installed Skype for free phone calls over the net! I'm about to go to a small shop and buy herbal candy - from a store owned by the manufacturer - so it's a lot cheaper - and has been made to the same recipe for 100 years - no artificial crap. I could probably sell that on Ebay! LOL
Posted by: Mike10613 at June 26, 2005 07:40 AM