We've been signed up with eBay since Saturday, March 14, 1998, but we didn't really start selling until April of 2001. You might say we spent the first 3 years doing research - buying stuff, seeing how eBay worked and finding out what we liked and disliked about online transactions. We're still learning, of course, but the main thing we've learned is no surprise: if you sell to the public, you need to put a lot of yourself into the selling. And, because you're not dealing with folks face to face, communication is vital; you just can't have too much. Pretty basic business sense.

Our eBay handle (or identity) is golden_valley and we have a feedback rating of over 2,000. We put in some long days (and weeks, and months...) keeping the business going. We are at the point of trying to maintain about 20 to 30 auctions a day, and that's a lot of work. That also forces us to plan pretty far ahead if we need to go somewhere. A day trip (shopping in Las Vegas, an auction in Phoenix, etc.) just means an awfully long day, anything longer means we have to make sure no ads expire while we're gone. We've got all our emergencies scheduled for when we're in a nursing home, 30 or 40 years from now.

Our division of labor works out real well. Linda is the resident html expert, Benney is the computer god. Linda does almost all the bookkeeping, Benney does almost all the corespondence. Linda sells mostly books and computer software, Benney sells mostly computers and computer parts. We each write and maintain our own ads. Our business tools are 3 computers networked together, using 4 different printers and a two-way wireless system for internet access. We live 20 miles, or so, from the nearest U.S. Post Office and that daily trip gives us time to communicate and make plans.

We design and write our own ads using a simple "notepad" type word processor called EditPad. We like the control we get doing it that way. Here are 3 examples of our ads: one Linda wrote for a book, one Benney wrote for a motherboard and one we worked on together for some educational software. We always have pictures with all our ads now that eBay hosts the first picture free. We make all our own pictures using either our digital camera or our scanner, and we make them the right type & size by using a video editing program called Paint Shop Pro. The pictures must be okay, because we see other folks stealing them and using them with their ads! Or, sometimes they steal our ads too.