I have joined the eBay Nation, and it is good. This Web site has changed the world of buying and selling used cars, trucks, motorcycles, and (in my case) trailers. Five years ago, I would have parked my vintage motor home by the side of road with a bright orange For Sale sign tacked to it and hoped for a bite. And hoped that no weirdos came into my yard. And hoped that the check didn't bounce. You would have sold your car that way, too, or you would have put an ad in the paper, or maybe you would have just resigned yourself to taking a bath in trade-in while buying a new car.
On eBay, you place an ad for three, five, seven, or ten days with up to thirty-five photos (the more photos, the better your chances for the big score). You put a fixed price on it, or you offer your vehicle for auction. If it's to be auctioned, you decide how little you'll take for it, then open up the bidding.
The beauty of the eBay universe is that not only is its geographical scope enormous, but it is filled with dedicated buyers.
The eBay Motors division broke out of the big auction morass in April 2000 with die-cast models and collectibles. In that foreshortened year, it did $400 million in business. At the end of 2001, eBay Motors had grown to $1.4 billion, then to $3 billion by the end of 2002, a year in which 300,000 cars passed through the eBay Motors pipeline. That's a stunning 182 percent average annual growth. Today, it's the largest national marketplace for used cars, with 7 million unique visitors per month, accounting for fully one-third of eBay's total online market.
Check this out: eBay Motors sells more used cars by lunchtime on any given day than the average car dealer sells in a year.
Them are some apples. And I wanted some of them apples for my trailer. My friend at DaimlerChrysler, Bob Boniface, had some misgivings. "My friends who buy things say they're getting a steal. The guys who sell things say they're getting top dollar. Now, that can't be. Someone is getting hosed here!"
I don't know about any of that, but I wasn't going to be afraid. I was going to do it all by myself to prove it could be done. I logged on with an overload of digital photos at the ready. I also had a secret weapon: former Automobile Magazine gopher of renown, Steve Haas. We always knew the personable, self-effacing Haas would make it big. And, lucky for me, his career path had taken him to eBay Motors, a turn of events I discovered when I bumped into him while strolling the lawn at Pebble Beach in mid-August. I almost knocked him over when he told me about eBay. The thing I was going to do all by myself suddenly became the thing that Haas was going to make sure I didn't screw up.
I wanted to "go live" on September 1, so, of course, I began the process on August 29. Not that I leave everything until the last minute, but pretty much everything. That was the day I called Haas, and he told me about CarAd, a company that had developed eBay software for car dealers with multiple listings. It was so cool that eBay Motors bought it in March 2003 and brought it into the fold for everyone to use.
I logged on to www.carad.com and found a really easy-to-use template that allowed me to describe quickly the trailer's features and its condition. Haas helped me through the process over the phone, and he even plucked the Automobile Magazine logo from our Web site and pasted it into my ad to give it a little more graphic cheese. You're on your own on the html front.
Did I say I had an overload of digital photos at the ready? Make that three photos, but remember, I still had two entire days to shoot and load the other thirty-two views. No sweat. Meanwhile, I played with the CarAd software, which allowed me to edit the entire ad and then view what it would look like online without actually posting it. You would answer yes-or-no questions such as "Are you the original owner?" and "Do you smoke?" The CarAd software would translate your checked answers into ad copy that read something like this: "Smells as new as the day this one-owner beauty left the showroom." And it actually creates different versions of that copy so no two ads sound quite alike.
I took photos of every single detail, as recommended by eBay's online advice, including the two spots of water damage on the ceiling. Early on the morning of September 1, I discovered that my photos would not load into my ad. The photo files were apparently so big that it was going to take thirty-four minutes per photo just to get them sent to CarAd. This was no time to get a Photoshop tutorial. Or to read my camera's owner's manual. I just bit down hard and started sending them, thirty-four minutes at a time. Some took less time. Eventually (as in hours and hours later), I had about twenty detail photos up-loaded, ready to place in the ad. But it would not happen. I frantically sent an e-mail via the "live help" link. It was not live enough. So I hit the "launch" button, and my ad went up as promised on September 1, with a mere three photos, none of which included an interior shot of the trailer's honeyed splendor.
And then I remembered Haas. It was nine in the evening on a national holiday, but he worked for eBay Motors, so I figured he must be online. He called back within ten minutes. By then, there already had been a half-dozen e-mails asking for more photos and three bids! Actual bids!
This was a problem. You can edit your ad only if there are no bids on your item. So Haas made a corporate decision to shut my auction down. He took it offline and waited for CarAd to catch up with the electronic news that the auction was over. Then Haas went into my files, took the twenty photos, and uploaded them. What he discovered in the process was that CarAd did not support my browser (Netscape Navigator) but worked only through Microsoft Explorer. (By the time you read this, everything will have changed, and there will be more photo information online. There even should be a new eBay service that makes sure your photos are in the right format and ready to upload.) Haas suggested that I e-mail the high bidder about the new auction.
That's what it took for my trailer to take off. I headed for the Frankfurt motor show, checking in from France and Germany to watch the page views go up (by roughly 200 per day) and the bids climb steadily until my reserve was hit with one day left to go. Very exciting! In the end, I made a few hundred dollars over the reserve, thanks to a very nice doctor, Suzanne LaFollette, who lives in rural Illinois with her husband and their flock of sheep. She remembered taking a family vacation in a trailer in the early 1950s and had fantasized her entire adult life about owning her own trailer.
She sent the check overnight. In gratitude, my husband and I decided to deliver the trailer on a fine Sunday morning. We set it up (complete with its fringed, striped awning) next to the pasture, where Bosco and 88, the two sheep too old to be at the breeder's, came out for a gander when called. It looked mighty fine.
This was LaFollette's first eBay experience, too, and she confided that her final price would have been nearly twice what she paid for my trailer. As for me, I got more than I'd secretly wanted.
Maybe it is a buyer's and a seller's market out there.