Online sales, or what Brown did for me

Since about 2001 I’ve been selling on eBay. Over the years eBay has been very good to me. I started out in computer equipment, moved on to wallpaper borders, furniture slipcovers, pond pump equipment, rain bells chimes, afghan blankets, and finally ending up in designer bedding.

By far the most exciting times were the UPS uniform bash of late 2002. One day while browsing eBay listings I came across a uniform vest for $800. Clueless, I watched as it sold in just two days. I happened to be working at UPS as a morning loader. A driver gave me one of his old jackets for half the proceeds. I posted it and it sold in a day.

After researching the sales history I discovered that all the sales were BuyItNow (BIN) only. There were many people listing at auction style, but the buyer was only BIN’ing every other day. I quickly bought up a bunch of auction listings, each less than $20, then reposted at BINs of at least $300 each. Sure enough, everything BIN’ed within two days. My best was a jacket I purchased for $30, had overnighted (UPS, of course), then posted for $999. Sold in a day.

The purchaser, even though buying under different UserIDs, was always a Mailboxes ETC drop in Manhattan. The buying spree lasted about two months before a nervous eBay clamped down. Sales moved to YahooAuctions for maybe a couple weeks, then died completely.

It took maybe two months, but one day two suits showed up at the UPS hub and wanted to talk. Turns out the buyer had been interns on a project at UPS’s law firm. The suites had the details of every transaction and wanted their money back. They believed that all the product had been stolen, but were stymied when I told of purchasing it all online.

They decided that the best course was to ask me to quietly resign. While I imagined an enticing process of fighting it, the rest of my eBay product sales were doing pretty good, so I took the opportunity to pursue them full-time.

I remember being contacted by reporters twice, in the following months, to confirm details of transactions. The media was flooded with rumors of terrorists buying up uniforms. I provided the more sane explanation of a UPS legal team with too big a budget, and childish smarts, running rampant on the Internet.