Adventures in Selling or What Comes After EBay?

I mentioned in my biography this all started because of a friend who branched out in his own antiques business and began selling on-line. It was back at the end of 1997....when eBay...the big Gorilla, was just an infant. I got my id..RAINBOWSEEKER in April of 1998.

It was really exciting in those days. Photo hosting companies were hard to find, heck some people didn't even use pictures. Templates were almost unknown unless you made them yourself.....no accounting programs either unless you made them yourself..... page counters were rare and there was no way of scheduling an auction except to list it on the hour you wanted it to finish. It was still a new frontier, but the buyers were there and the action was AWESOME. I can still remember my friend saying "You can sell anything...even a sack of s...t!" And it was so true!

Among the things I also remember is how slow the site could get at night. How there were constant breakdowns. I remember when STARFIRE came on line .....and the ebay site took a major jump in size and service over just one weekend. Finally we got up to speed and man did we roll! I remember lots of little help sites springing up to fill in the gaps and all for free(for awhile at least). Among them were Pay Pal, Pongo, Auction Rover, and many more. It was a fun time then and we were really a community. The site listened and responded and we successfully policed ourselves. We helped each other and watched out for each other. Though all this growth, most important were the friends I made...sellers and buyers alike.

EBay changed alot of things in the collecting community around the world and locally. It changed what we could buy and sell...in those days the horizon was limitless. Local on site auctions went wild with sellers looking for merchandise. Garage sales and rummage sales and flea markets were never better attended. Stuff I had had in my attic came out of hiding....boxes I had not looked in in years got unpacked again. Listing was a frenzy and life selling was GREAT on eBay and off.

For a few years I even did better selling on eBay than we did in our shops or at our antique shows where we were selling much bigger and more expensive items like refinished furniture and accessories. Along the way I learned some basic html....made templates....and sold my items with an unconditional, satisfaction guarantee. The same way I sold at our shows or in our shops. As in our local business, this practice went a long way to building a wonderful and loyal customer base. I still sell this way today and some of my early buyers are still customers.

Life on eBay was pretty great for those first 5 years. I did many things right in those days and some things wrong. My biggest mistake was not recognizing that this could not last forever.

So when did it begin to go down hill? Probably about the time Meg Whitman came on the scene and eBay went public. So now we are getting to my first big mistake....not recognizing when the slide downhill was beginning. Heck...I was too busy selling. I am a powerseller on the silver level, and I was busy selling and making excuses. As small markets started to dry up due to rising fees...I just adapted. I sold larger groupings or dropped some categories all together if they got too bad. It was still fun learning new markets and expanding some of my favorites. I thought I could adapt forever.....never mind old Meg and the crew.

I also tried to ignore how eBay was coming between me and my customer. More and more it felt like they wanted us to behave like we sold out of a mail order operation and never spoke with our customers. Hey...not me...I still send personal e-mails! I'm the queen of adapation...right? WRONG! It was getting harder and harder.

The rest of my story could be a long crying fest. It can all be summed up by saying once eBay started hurting my customers experience I got angry and very upset. And suddenly I realized that here I am with no options anymore. It's do it eBay's way or don't do it at all.

Fortunately during the beginning days of Vladuz and SMI, while I was still something of an activist on the eBay forums participating in boycotts, etc., a wonderful friend found me and knocked some sense in my head. The big message that I knew, but she really drove home to me was...YOU CAN NO LONGER AFFORD TO HAVE ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET. And this friend led me to a spot where a new community had sprung up to help people like me get on with the next chapter in selling on the internet.

That location is PHEEBAY.COM. There I found several people who had gotten tired of eBay's constant changes and rising fees about a year before I did. They had begun on their little site teaching people like me about ALTERNATIVE SITES....or what they call the ST. ELSEWHERES.

I moped around for awhile crying in my beer, but finally faced the music and began to throughly look at what they were doing. I listened to many people who popped in and out of the site talking about how they had moved on successfully. One of the biggest characters there that impressed me the most was an ex-ebayer who called himself FIREMEG. He was making it off eBay ....and finally I realized I could too, but I had and have a long way too go. And it was time to get busy!

So that will be my next chapter. I will say in closing that I now am selling on 2 alternative sites and I have had sales. I am working toward increasing my volume on those sites by increasing my personal SEO with the help of PHEEBAY. I also still sell on eBay, because I have to face reality and still pay my mortgage. My plans are to also build my own website and I am creating my own little web of links to fit that into the picture.

It's been fun and sad too. I have my community back and I am even back stirring the pot sometimes on eBay. After all I am a product of the 60's!

Check back here and I'll add on to this talking about some of the things I have done over the past year....and some of the things I am doing today. In the meantime take a look at my selling locations listed below. Try some of them out...and where ever you go watch for me....I'm still the RAINBOWSEEKER everywhere. PEACE and HAPPY HUNTING OUT THERE!!