The pages I ended up designing were output as a single PDF file, but all user interface elements (which of course look like informally sketched back-of-the-napkin drawings) were clickable. So you click the login dialog on the home page and it takes you to My Auctions (which is only visible if you log in), then click an auction to see an example auction detail, etc.

Two things that jumped out me were that 1) Mockups did everything I wanted, the way it should, right down to an ingenious way of designing grid output using text. And 2) In 25 hours of heavy use, 15 hours of it at one sitting, it never crashed or hung, illustrating that Adobe AIR is totally ready for prime to as a dev environment, something I expected not to happen (writing dev tools is hard). It also showed that Peldi, the Mockups creator, is a superb programmer.

Mockup’s sole shortcoming was that for the PDF output to be clickable, you had to open all pages int the PDF (43, again), which are considered Mockups projects, at once. In other words, it wasn’t enough to create the PDF if I opened the home page project, which is the root of a tree that ultimately represents the whole site. I had to open every project it links to. This is a deficiency of Mockups, not AIR. The point is that Mockups worked perfectly with 43 projects open, which means that AIR is, ah, airtight in terms of internal data structure, memory management, etc. I’d incude our PDF put it’s 5 megs. Suffice it to say that I’d be shocked if there’s anything even remotely close to Mockups for this kind of job.

From the beginning I have wanted eSnipe’s design to be great, but “great” is literally in the eye of the beholder. When those beholders pay your bills by trusting you with not only their money but their eBay bids, you get flexible about “great”. It turns out that the users and I agree to disagree about good design. That, and I got lazy.

I am a second-rate web designer and have always known it. I can also say with a straight face that while I know this to be true, my first revision to the eSnipe design was its most popular. The eSnipe creator and first designer was a delightful gentleman from the corporate world whose strength was in innovation more than graphic design. His logo for eSnipe was more literal-minded than many users liked, and bore a stylized gunsight, which drew a number of complaints from gun-haters.

eSnipe's First Logo

Gun hate Triggers eSnipe 2.0

No need to alienate them. In 2000 we spent $150 or so to have a logo designed by a gent in Romania. At this time the Nike swoosh was a massive force in commercial design. Everyone was imitating it, Amazon included, and I figured in a few years swooshes would look as dated as those crazy trapezoid shapes from the 1950s, so my one requirement was: no swoosh.

Our one requirement: No swooshes!:

It had not one, not two, but… three swooshes. We went with it anyway. I was out $150 and didn’t want to waste any more money or time. eSnipe was self-funded and therefore particularly risky. Hint: not all spouses take these ventures with complete equanimity, especially when you’re eating into the retirement fund. I was working out of my basement while taking care of very young children. Extra swooshes were pretty low on my priority list.

Meanwhile, you design a site around the logo, and I took this task on myself. The site was pretty small at that time. I like shiny things, but I often don’t like to take care of them. I did a few high visibility pages, then waved my hands ineffectually at the rest.

This left Stephen, our brilliant and scrupulous programmer at that time, to finish up the things I didn’t care about, like the screens used to take your money or to present your bids (the My Auctions page). In other words… the really important pages. The ones users care about most got the least attention from me.

Because here’s the thing. Once they join, few of our users ever return the home page. Instead, they bookmark My Auctions. They normally don’t revisit the home page unless the login expires or they snipe from someone else’s computer. I should have been more more careful about those ergonomics. Stephen put a great deal of attention into the workflow, and I should have given the look of the interior that kind of devotion.

Anyway, we got precious few complaints on the new design. Many more people told me how much they liked the new look. I was secretly impressed with myself. “Secretly” may be a little strong. I told people for years, including new designers, that I was the most popular designer eSnipe ever had. It will always be technically true:  my design received the smallest number of complaints, and therefore the highest complaint/compliment ratio in our history. As you can see… well, I’ll keep my day job.

eSnipe Post-Triple-Swoosh Redesign

Sort of has that Google no design design. No pictures other than the logo, because images consume far more bandwidth than words. Web servers were expensive then. Throughput was hugely important. eSnipe has always been a very busy site, and we didn’t want to waste time sending graphics down the wire when we could use those same resources placing bids.

(The technical among you will immediately see that on a busy site those jobs should be done by different servers using different priorities and possibly even different server software. Yes, yes, and yes. Stephen was ahead of you. But at that time we had somewhat limited resources and it was hard enough just to find high-performance servers at a reasonable price in those days.)

eSnipe made good coin from the day we started charging, which surprised me more than anyone. As new users came onboard, it sort of felt incumbent on me to make the site appear more businesslike. eBay users are canny and suspicious when it comes to trusting their personal information to sites other than eBay.

This was true even in the early years of eBay’s acquisition of PayPal. For years afterward, our users pressured us to create a competing payment system. I believe this is less a reflection on PayPal, which has been nothing but win for eSnipe, and more on the users’ innate nervousness at sharing the most private of information with an uninvited third party.

eSnipe 3.0 is Bank

The next redesign was meant to give the appearance of solidity and trustworthiness. For the next phase we hired Clifton Karnes, the brilliant industrial and graphic designer. He gave me a page-long questionnaire about what I wanted the design to be. I hate paperwork. I completed the survey not because he’s expensive, which he is, but because Clif’s a rocking designer whom I respect greatly.

The questionnaire was a game-changer. It forced me to think about my brand and how I wanted it to appear to people in ways I would have taken years to discover myself. I was not without firm requirements going in. Three things I knew ahead of time without the questionnaire:
1. The new logo should look good in only 1 color (back then, print costs were high and I thought offline efforts or even business cards might use this requirement)
2. It should look timeless. I want this logo to look great in 100 years, like the handwritten Coke logo.
3. Please. No swoosh.

eSnipe logo circa 2002

Clif did characteristically well on #1 and #2. As far as #3, well, you can’t always get what you want.

What is it with graphic designers and swooshes?

I let Clif get away with it, because this was really a damn good swoosh. It didn’t have the tacked-on feeling as the our first one, which is somehow the most static-looking swoosh in the rich and varied history of swooshes, even though it was actually triplets.

Clif was clever, too, in bringing back the crosshairs almost subliminally as the dot over the “i”. I’m pretty sure no gun-hating customers ever made that connection. As far as I can recall no one complained about its subtle return.

Sometime in 2002 or 2003 Clif’s logo, which we kept secret, was used as the kernel of the site redesign. Clif gave me another survey. This time I filled it out with care and anticipation. The goals for this redesign were (roughly from memory):

• Be inviting
• Engender trust
• Clean graphic appearance
• Flexible layout for news stories
• Low bandwidth

The “trust” thing was huge. Few people know that eSnipe is the first site to make a micropayment system profitable, but also one of the very first sites to requirement payment for its services and survive past initial funding. I told Clif I wanted eSnipe to feel as trustworthy as a bank’s website. The reason was simple. People were understandably very nervous giving money to websites, far more then than they are now. We were one of the first self-provisioned automated payment systems, meaning that users didn’t have to wait for us to approve a credit card charge.

Oh, and one more thing. Our users are eBay users.

eBay users live in an immersive, sharply defined, focused, and constantly exciting world. Finding an item you’ve sought for years, seeing its current price (invariably either suspiciously low or disappointingly high), monitoring it over the days as bids come in, the lurch in your gut when you win the auction (what brilliant terminology! Not complete the auction; not execute a successful bid; not make your purchase, but…. win!): even after 11 years it’s always a roller-coaster ride for me.

From what I can tell, maybe eBay doesn’t even understand how very much they’ve become a part of the zeitgeist. I know I do, because when someone’s bid gets jammed up somewhere, we hear about it. Regardless of whether it’s pilot error, problem remembering a password, eBay’s bidding algorithm, or change in IP address that makes eBay suspicious, it’s our fault. When you lose a bid for the ‘76 Fender Stratocaster you’ve been waiting on for the last 12 years, you will vent to our support.

When you do, you’ll get a personal reply, because that’s how eSnipe rolls. Doesn’t matter if you are angry because the problem is that you changed your password on eBay but forgot to update it with us, we file a support ticket and work it through until resolution.

eSnipe works by duplicating your eBay login process, then bidding shortly before the end of the auction. eBay won’t let sniping companies use its API, so we are responsible for maintaining lists of usernames and passwords. eBay users regard their accounts as something slightly less valuable than children and slightly more than world peace.

eBay represents something far more than just another online store to many of its customers. Many of them pour a substantial portion of their lives to the hobby or avocation or vocation or schooling or whatever it represents to them. eBay is the only place many of them can find what they’re looking for. Sellers, or buyers of high-ticket goods, also have a reputation to uphold in the form of eBay feedback.

Entrusting their passwords and usernames with us, then, means exposing some of their most important secrets to a third party. Managing their account information is a humbling and scary undertaking. So that’s why I wanted the site to look like a bank–or at least feel as trustworthy as a bank’s website.

Here’s what Clif rolled out.

eSnipe Redesign 2003

Made mine look like it was the product of a rank amateur, which it was. Now is that look banky or what? Banky is just what the doctor ordered. As eSnipe got bigger, many of the charms of being a smaller site, like the in-joke name or homemade look, lost their appeal as the eBay community grew.

The more eSnipe looked like a bank, I reasoned, the more users who weren’t certain about purchasing would take the plunge. It didn’t hurt that we offer a 30-day money back guarantee regardless of the auction results.

Clif’s site redesign also got a ton of complaints, far more than mine.

That was good news. It meant our user base had grown substantially. I ignored the complaints for a number of reasons. Many people hate change, and who should expect it more than pioneer web purchasers working with a relatively unknown business? I expected people to dislike it, and that they’d get used to it. We did get a few compliments, but many, many less than complaints.

I kept Clif’s design. First off, it was fantastic. Clif is a great designer. The complaints said much more about people’s need to keep eSnipe stable than it did about his mad skilz as a designer. I also had no other choice. The redesign was costly, it improved the site’s efficiency and it gave us room to grow.

I did consider testing it, but liked the result enough to deploy. Hey, I’m an entrepreneur, right? Of course I do things by the seat of my pants. Plus, at that time there just weren’t the kind of easy testing mechanisms that a site like SurveyMonkey now provides at rock-bottom prices.

eSnipe 4.0 Hits the Ground Running! After 7 Years

Scores of users visit eSnipe for the first time every day and sign up as users. This is pretty impressive. We do not advertise. All these signups are due to word of mouth, and of course every eSnipe user has a vested interest in keeping others out of the club. Think about it: if you get better deals because of eSnipe, at least part of the reason is that other buyers in your area of interest are not sophisticated enough to snipe their eBay bids. More snipers means less chance of your own sniping having the same impact. That’s the theory, anyway. In practice we represent only a fraction of 1% of eBay users, so feel free to spread the word.

New signups in the last couple of years have stabilized, even pulled back a little. This year I plan to do some advertising. If I advertise, I need to make my site look like it was designed, oh, I don’t know, some time in the 21st century. People to whom eSnipe is recommended probably won’t pay too much attention to its now somewhat dated appearance.

The connection is far weaker when they land on our home page via an ad. People who get advertised to are just looking for an excuse to move on, and with good reason. A site that takes your money should give the appearance of strength and modernity. We thought it necessary to update the look.

Besides, please. Seven years? Lame.

First thing we did was go to 99Designs to have our logo updated. 99Designs is a website where designers will create a logo for you on spec in a contest format. They get paid only if you choose a winner. Seems suicidal to me from the standpoint of a designer, but as a consumer I’m thrilled.

There were dozens of submissions. Many were less than inspired. A few were brilliant. The final list of entries looked like this. I chose as the winner one that was pretty close to the original but with a modern facade:

eSnipe 2010 logo

As I’ve learned over the years, revising the logo is a little dangerous. We want something that looks modern to prospective customers yet won’t repel existing users. I think the results are excellent. The contest was ably managed by Oxstein Labs, about whom much more will come in a future post.

Because I love the existing logo and updating it felt somehow very personal, I didn’t really open this contest up to the public, though I welcomed internal discussion (and ignored dissent, of course). The Oxstein crew felt that the home page redesign should get a vote from our audience, I agreed.

And good thing, too, because our audience chose a design I didn’t favor. I get a little credit, though, because I predicted to the crew that it may turn out to be the winner. Here’s what the new eSnipe home page will look like.

eSnipe 2010 Redesign Winner

It was not my first choice. The design I favored strongly, one of 5 entrants in our audience survey, was the one shown next. It scored 20% in the audience survey, vs, 37.5% for the winner above:

Runner Up to eSnipe Redesign award

In Presidential election terms, that gap of 17.5% would be a landslide victory. The results of the survey gave me a number of valuable pieces of information:
1. I don’t know jack about my users.
2. I should have surveyed them on the logo redesign.
3. Very good artists are available at excellent prices, and you need to collaborate with them to get what you want. Or get Oxstein Labs to work with them, which I like even more.
4. The people at Oxstein Labs are incredibly smart and know this stuff cold.

Next on our list: internal page designs like My Auctions, tutorials, and making purchases. This time, I won’t punt on them. We have half a million registered users, and I no longer get to improvise the way I used to.

It’s not as fun as it sounds. I had this problem when I bought eSnipe.com, which when on sale on eBay 10 years ago. Forty grand will always be a lot to me, but it was a good chunk of the retirement fund back then. That was the number my wife and I decided to risk on the purchase. It was the very lowest point of the first dot com bubble burst. All I knew about eSnipe was that I liked it, and that the owner had posted a few honest remarks about troubles with the site on the home page, and suddenly there was a low-key announcement about the sale.

Usenet posters at the time thought it was a hoax. Perhaps they didn’t understand the depths of the market crash, and at the time any site run so well seemed like it must be a multimillion dollar corporation. It wasn’t. It was run by one very smart, very nice, slightly overwhelmed Web pioneer whose hobby had run wildly out of control.

I didn’t know that when I read the eSnipe home page two days before auction close. All I knew was that we had to make a decision so fast that we had to recognize it might be a scam. There was no time for the kind of due diligence one would normally allocate to an investment of that size. But that’s…

Tip #1: Never bid more than you’re ready to lose.

One thing I knew was that I had to learn more about the current owner: take the measure of the man. And fast.

Tip #2: Create a relationship with the seller.

Get the seller’s phone number. Ask hard questions (with the kind of politeness and respect you would like were you the seller), both via the phone and via email. If you aren’t satisfied by an answer, drill down. If you still aren’t satisfied, move on. I greatly respected the fact that the previous owner was willing to say he didn’t know something instead of making up what he thought what I wanted to hear. I talked to him several times over a period of two days and got lots of great information that he couldn’t put in the auction listing.

These days you have another option: getting the important points in print, even if they weren’t made part of the auction listing.

Tip #3: Use the eBay messaging system for any questions of material interest to the sale.

If the seller tells you on the phone that something is in mint condition and that’s a substantial factor in its sale price, then ask for a confirmation through the messaging. This gives you a paper trail. Another option is asking the seller to use the Q&A format on the auction page.

Tip #4: Be willing to walk away.

Easier said than done, I know. Very often on eBay we are pursuing hobbies we are passionate about.

My best house negotiation was when we decided to move for no other reason than we wanted a change of scenery. It was during the last real estate bubble. Because the move wasn’t necessary, I could look as long as I wanted, and sellers couldn’t manipulate me the way they could if it were, say, for a job relocation or because I needed a cheaper place.

I fell in love with the house.

Yes, I know you’re not supposed to. Prices were supposedly going up every day (my Spidey sense was tingling, though, and I was right. We bought at the peak. Luckily I drove a hard bargain and the house has never gone underwater) Still, at all times I forced myself to be mentally ready to find another one if I felt negotiations went off track. The same was true with eSnipe, but for other reasons: I kept it at arm’s length emotionally because the sale was announced so abruptly, and with so little fanfare. I had to be rational because I didn’t have time to fall in love with it!

Keep in mind that millions of items are listed on eBay each day. There is no serious competition for eBay anywhere in the world. It is everyone’s first choice for selling things like cars, electronics, musical instruments, or collectibles on the Web. Chances are, no matter how much you like that 1936 Mickey Mouse watch in such beautiful condition, another one will appear in the next few months. Step back, be honest with yourself, and think very hard about that likelihood before you get tempted to overpay.

Tip #5: Snipe the bid (place it just seconds before the end of the auction)

I use eSnipe to make the bid because you can change your mind anytime up to 5 minutes before the auction and cancel the bid, a luxury you do not have if you place it on eBay directly. eBay makes it hard to retract bids, for some very good reason (mostly related to fraud control). You can have your cake and eat it too by placing the bid with eSnipe instead. Because we don’t hit eBay until seconds before the auction close, you can always cancel the bid without eBay ever knowing should you come to your senses about that Mickey Mouse watch.

Trivia item: About 20% of eSnipe bids get canceled.

One obvious tip is to avoid sellers who insist on weird, off-the-books forms of payment or who need a cashier’s check overnighted to them. They should accept any form of payment familiar to most eBay users.

Bonus tip: Anytime you get even the merest hint of a gut feeling that something about the seller just isn’t right, pull out of negotiations immediately.

Remember, falling in love with something on eBay is dangerous. In every sense, put the Golden Rule to work. If you were a seller and accepted checks, you would of course want the check to clear before you sent the item. So don’t expect the seller to mail out that 1959 Fender Stratocaster until your check clears. On the other hand, if you were selling something expensive, you would surely accept escrow, PayPal, even a visit from an impartial third party.

Tip #6: Use PayPal if at all possible.

The bad news for sellers is that PayPal is pretty much a “guilty until proven innocent” operation on their side of the transaction. Which means that you, the buyer, wield a heavy cudgel. Buyers can return anything for just about any reason and PayPal almost always makes the seller eat it. Not really fair for sellers, a boon for the purchaser of an expensive item. Beware sellers who avoid PayPal because of the 3% fee. Sure, it’s more than one would like, but sellers who nickel-and-dime you may not be the kind you want to trust with your money in a major purchase.

Tip #7: Use an escrow service, especially if you don’t have the protection of PayPal.

I have used escrow.com a couple of times and it went well. They’re especially good for intellectual property items, such as domain names or websites. Less good for, say, guitars, because all they can assure is that the item gets delivered to you. They don’t help you in judging an item’s quality as compared to the seller’s description.

My $40,000 purchase went swimmingly, even though there wasn’t even a Businesses for Sale category back then. eSnipe supports our family well, and I’ve met lots of wonderful people over these last 10 years. Even now I browse eBay for businesses, but carefully. Seven years ago I dropped $10K on an awful charm bracelet site and lost another $8K trying to make it work. Five years ago I bought a $7000 DVD site and bungled that too. (What was I thinking?) At least both transactions went fine because I stuck to the principles listed here.

Have you ever made a big purchase on eBay? Tell me all about it, either in the comments or, if it’s compelling enough, in a guest post.

“Who’s this?” the person demanded, after a longer-than-expected pause when I answered the phone. “I’m Tom Campbell,” I said. “How can I help you?” “Oh, I thought you were a recording,” she explained, speaking with unself-conscious, exaggerated care. I told her I get that a lot. There’s something artificial about the way I answer the phone, maybe sort of overmodulated. Not really sure what I can do about it, but sorry.

Another pause.

“I’m trying to reach eSnipe,” she said a bit belligerently. “Who’s this?” A little weird to be the this in “Who’s this?” Why not just ask who are you? Who’s this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Whatever. “I’m the CEO,” I replied. “Is there something I can help you with?”

At this point just insert inappropriate pauses at random mentally. I’ll stop detailing each one. There were just too many.

“No you’re not,” she said slowly, maybe carefully.

“I’m sorry?”

“You can’t be. You’re not the CEO of eSnipe. Are you?”

I assured her that I was the CEO.

“That’s bleeping amazing. Really? You answered the bleeping phone, and you’re the CEO? I don’t believe it.” She wasn’t really using the word “bleeping”, but this is a family blog.  ”There’s a problem with your site.” “Happy to help you, but if it’s a support issue I’m the wrong guy. I don’t know how to use the support software but our people are really good. They usually get back to you within a few minutes during the business day. What seems to be the problem? If it’s an easy one I might be able to point you in the right direction.”

She veered right back to the theme that seemed most comfortable to her. “You answered the bleeping phone, at like, what time of night?” “I think it’s about 10:30 here in Washington state.” “Wow. I mean, no CEO ever answers the phone, and not at like 11:30 or whatever. Is it really that late?” Ah… Yes.”Do you know your phone number is published like that? Anyone can call you. Do you want to be doing that?” “I don’t mind. People like you pay the bills. I figure anyone clever enough to track down my phone number probably has a good reason. What’s the problem?”

“About what?” she asked.

This time the pause was mine.

“Um, you said you had a problem?”

No answer.

“You called me a moment ago, and asked if I knew the problem was with my site.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, suddenly chipper. “That’s cool. I don’t even remember it. I’m drinking a little. I still can’t believe you answered your phone. That’s bleeping outrageous. You are so bleeping cool. I can’t believe you thought of a business like this. I love it. I love how people can, you know, take an idea and run with it. It’s bleeping brilliant.  You’re like, an inventor or something.”

I allowed as how I hadn’t thought of the idea. I just bought the business, almost 9 years ago at this point. ”But you… but you… that’s OK, even if you didn’t invent it, I never would have thought of that. It’s a bleeping great site!”

The conversation wore on like that, and eventually I discovered that even an ego as gigantic as mine can live without the sugar rush of compliments from someone who is not only stoned out of her gourd, but who has a memory span approximately three sentences long. I tried to steer the conversation back on course, and hit upon the obvious. Even drunk, most people can talk about themselves fairly articulately.

Most people.

“What do you use eSnipe for?” I love hearing why people use eSnipe. The answers are fascinating much more often than not. After the requisite pause she said “I’m a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control.” “Most cool! And what does a researcher at CDC buy on eBay?” “Well, I don’t want to get personal. I don’t really feel comfortable doing that.” But you felt comfortable drunk dialing a stranger, forgetting why you called, and spending 1o minutes telling him how bleeping brilliant he was?

As the conversation slid downhill I pondered options for terminating it, then realized that subtlety would not be required. “Well, I appreciate your calling, and if you ever do figure out what it was that bothered you, feel free to email me at the same address where you found my phone number.” “Oh yeah. Where did I get your number, anyway? I still can’t believe how bleeping cool it is that the CEO would answer it.” “It’s my cell phone, so I pretty much always answer it. Thanks for calling and don’t forget support next time!” Somehow it worked and she hung up happy.

All in all, not as interesting as the porn star who called me the first year I took the reins at eSnipe, back when I did in fact handle all support. At least Dr. Inebriate’s call didn’t result in a threat of dismemberment from my wife.

Don’t spend $1.3 million on an Internet business.

There. You’ve learned it! Seriously, though, there’s a bit more to that very expensive lesson, one that cost me my life’s savings and very nearly my marriage.  The complete lesson is a syllogism: a chain of statements connected by logic. Here it is in full.

1. People spend lots of money for all kinds of things on the Internet. And by a lot, I mean hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
2. You can spend a lot of money trying to market something people aren’t sure they need, but you aren’t guaranteed success.
3. People buy when you sell something they’re desperate for.
4. You don’t need to do much marketing when people are desperate for something.
5. Therefore… sell what people are already desperate for.

I lost my shirt selling something people weren’t desperate for. It was a classified site that was superior to Craigslist in every way. Guess what. People aren’t desperate for an improved Craigslist. Sure, if you ask, they say they’d like one. But they aren’t desperate.

How do you find out what people are desperate for in the eBay world? One way is to learn what searches are most common. Another way is to see what sellers are most successful. You can find both at eBay Pulse.

Here’s a bonus lesson many of you will ignore. It is so frustratingly, maddeningly simple that it makes Yoda sound like Shakespeare. The lesson is this: Sell what other people are successful selling. Here, let me repeat it. I think maybe you got distracted for a second.

Sell what other people are successful selling.

Ignore this lesson at your peril. I bet you think the trick is to sell a brand new product into a brand new market that you have created. Sure! This definitely works! Like maybe once in every 30 billion tries, or for pharmaceutical companies who can spend $1 billion developing a new drug and another $200 million marketing it. Inventing a new product or market won’t work for you. It is the path to heartbreak.

I have been a careful watcher of Microsoft for a quarter century, and Microsoft is one of the most successful companies ever. One of the criticisms leveled most frequently at them is that they only steal ideas from other companies, that they don’t invent their own products. Now, this is demonstrably untrue. I can name half a dozen innovations that came out of Microsoft. However, it is true that all their most successful products were indeed improvements on existing ideas. Bill Gates is way smarter than you, and here’s something he knew in his early 20s: let someone else do market research. He knew the pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs.

Don’t invent a new market, at least not to begin with. Understand what’s selling well, and start there.

See? I just saved you $1.3 million.

I am not a great saver. I am however an exceptional earner. Always have been, and it’s because I lived through the Seventies as a kid with eyes wide open. While other kids were watching TV, I was reading everything from Popular Science to Money to biographies of achievers to Andrew Tobias. My thought was this: many people weathered tough times successfully. If by reading I could learn from their successes (and mistakes) I could make a decent living even when times got hard.

Times got hard, obviously. Now here’s the funny thing. My methods of earning work better in bad times than in good. While we did just fine during the bubble, we didn’t make bubble money. During the recession, however, while business is down, I’m still doing pretty darn well. The $64,000 question is this: what have I learned that others can use?

Product X, my wholly unimaginative name for the course we’re developing is a method you can start with. It uses the revolutionary method known as “buy low, sell high”. Turns out that eBay, the world’s most diverse and efficient marketplace, is brimming with just such opportunities. This business can be started with a few hundred dollars’ investment and relies on your cleverness, plus some powerful third-party research tools now available for completed eBay auctions.

More later. I’m excited.

Using the scientific method

If you’ve ever thought about it, the only way to determine the best way to sell on eBay is the scientific method. Sell an item using one technique. Sell the exact same item using a different method. Compare the results.  Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Certainly there must be a fair number of successful sellers who have done this. But as far as I know, they aren’t telling. Makes sense. The most successful sellers are those with specific niches they exploit efficiently. Publishing their techniques would be a surefire way to inviting unwanted competition into their niches. Therefore from what I can tell no open source experiments of this kind have been done. So how to conduct such an experiment?

The Great eBay Seller Tips Experiment Methodology

You need a bunch of identical items to sell. You must sell one or two of them as baselines to see how the other ones will sell. You need to be able to conduct the experiment in a fairly short period, because many eBay sales patterns are seasonal. You need the guidance of good sellers. You need the kind of items you know will sell. You need to be willing to lose money, because some of your experiments will fail, and by fail I mean you’ll either not fetch the highest possible price or your item may not sell at all. What kind of a sucker wants to take those risks?

Sucker Experimental Subject needed

A sucker like me. And you’re going to help.

I have a couple dozen  first-generation iPod Shuffles I had imprinted with the name of a now-defunct startup. The imprints tiny and appear on the back of the iPods. The iPods are unopened.  I am willing to sacrifice these little critters to science in order to test various combinations of selling techniques and see which work best. All you have to do is contribute your best ideas. Over the next few weeks we’ll winnow out the ones worth trying, then put them to the test and see how well your eBay seller tips work.

Let the Great eBay Experiment Begin. Use the Comment feature to tell the world how you think we should sell the iPod Shuffles. Make the world safer for eBay sellerdom.

Cheers,

Tom Campbell

For years economists have used in their models the idea of a frictionless economy, which is one where both buyers and sellers know as much as possible about any particular item being sold, and about the market itself. Sellers can set fair prices and not accidentally price too low. Buyers can determine whether a seller’s price is reasonable and whether they are less likely to get ripped off. Before the Internet, this was a fiction used to illustrate how free markets should work. Until eBay it was understood that such an economy could never exist, but that as an illustration it could be used to calibrate the success of any transaction or market for both parties.

This problem led to the market for so-called “blue books”.  These were expensive yearbooks issued in particular markets to help buyers and sellers determine good prices for things like cars and comic books. In theory it’s a good idea, but it’s one that has always favored the dealers.  The blue books tended to be vague about where data came from. They would cite things like auction results and newspaper ads, but no rigorous explanation of their methodology could ever be found. So if you were a 14-year old who was assured by a comic book dealer that a comic was worth $100 and you paid only $50, the dealer would “prove” it to you with the blue book. Of course, when you tried to sell the comic back, that $100 would suddenly become $7, and you’d get some muttered dissembling about fluctuating market conditions. I always thought the blue book ideas was corrupt, and I remember seeing that notion proved when a guitar I know to be nonexistent was listed in a blue book with 3 different price ranges, one for each possible condition.

The power of blue books has decreased dramatically with eBay, and thank heavens for that. Think about it: eBay, or whatever replaces eBay if they don’t start minding the store, is the closest we’ll ever get to a frictionless economy. You can see what people were actually willing to pay for something, if they were willing at all. How cool is that? You can often see photographs of the actual item, and even, occasionally, comments from other customers. An economist’s dream come true, and in fact thousands of academic papers have relied on eBay data in the decade or so eBay has become a potent market force.

And yet for some reason eBay wants to become Amazon. Why?

My theory is this: top management at eBay is ashamed of of being America’s flea market. I think when they go golfing with their Silicon Valley cronies and hear about the latest play in social media or Amazon’s amazing profits, they’re a little bit embarrassed. eBay is so low tech. It’s so 1995.  It’s so… regular people. I think they’re throwing away an opportunity to become bigger than ever. Why not just be happy that you’re the best flea market there ever was? The concept of the agora is an honorable one, dating back thousands of years. Remember the stand-up philosophers in Mel Brooks’ “History of the World?” Something close to that really happened. Philosophers did sometimes stand up on platforms and try to sell their ideas while throngs of consumers shopped for grapes and olive oil.  The marketplace was thought to be an essential element of society, and might be thought of as the birthplace of the concept of free speech here in the West. Even if that sounds pompous, eBay is undeniably a vibrant expression of the near-frictionless market and is nothing at all to be ashamed of.

I’d rather see eBay spend an extra $50 million on fraud control than blow another billion on the next Skype. And I bet their bottom line would like it too.