The eBay Killers

CHAPTER ONE

My name is Mike Winters, I am twenty-nine and live in a converted garage at the back of my mother's house. I was the child of my father's first and only marriage, and my mother's third. While many people debated behind closed doors whether my parents had ever loved each other, I chose to maintain the view I was the product of a once happy union, rather than a boozy romp at the end of a long night out.

The one I thing remember clearly about my parents was how different they were. Where my father was gentle, quiet, considered and kind, my mother, Bev was a loud, trash-talking self-opinionated Bogan. Their backgrounds were polar opposites with my father building a long and distinguished career with the Department of Foreign Affairs while Bev etched out an unremarkable existence working back of house at various hotels around Canberra. Bev loved drinking, gambling and arguing.

Family gatherings were always an interesting affair, and inevitably split into the separate teams as Bev and her heavy drinking relatives gathered to bitch and workshop their latest conspiracy theories about why they could never get ahead in life. In the time following the death of my father, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the whisperings of Bev being a 'gold digger' and 'black widow'.

Thanks to a clever, and vigorously disputed clause in my father's will, I was actually a 50% owner in the house, but relations with my mother had degraded to the point where the granny flat was the centre of my real estate holdings. Six years on the counter at a local bank, combined with a shrinking circle of friends left me isolated and questioning where my life was going. I was living pay-to-pay, living a monastic live on the pittance that remained after kicking in my share for the mortgage and bills on the house.

I wanted my own home, but knew if I waited for Bev to die, I would be in the granny flat a very long time. She would live to ninety-nine just to spite me and ensure my father's dream of the house once again being a family home, was never unfulfilled. I concluded if my life was to change, then I had to take action and change it.

The high-level plan wasn't that complicated or uncommon for any twenty-something still living at home. All I needed to find a way to make extra money to top up my bank wage, and when I had enough, make a break for it. While my share of the house was secure, cashing out would need Bev's agreement to sell, and it was madness to hope for that to happen any time soon. I was caught between a rock and a hard place. While I searched for what my new source of income could be, I became increasingly restless and desperate, and open any scheme with even the slimmest prospect of success that crossed my path.

Desperation lead to my ears pricking up while channel surfing on the old brown lounge, that had witnessed my first kiss, my first joint, my first breakup, and the slow shrivelling of my dreams. Current Affair was running one of those fluff pieces on the new generation of emerging Internet millionaires, who started with a good idea and access to the Internet. The story predictably transformed from news piece into an ad as the presenter shifted the focus from the entrepreneurs, to the nation-wide tour of 'free' workshops being touted by a guy calling himself the 'Millionaire Maker'.

I later discovered that the obviously paid advertorial was just the first instalment of Millionaire Maker's marketing drive. Over the next week the ads were on high rotation on radio and TV, half page promos appeared every day in the Canberra Times, and a fleet of mopeds towing mini-billboards appeared to be doing never-ending laps past the bank. I wasn't dumb, I knew exactly what was going down, but with yet another free Tuesday evening on my calendar, I folded and called the 1800 number to book my 'free' seat.

The workshop was a slick production, heavily loaded with emotional stories of lives transformed by a collection of sure-fire strategies and a few spare hours a week. Trestle tables straining under the weight of marketing books and training courses waited for the rush of aspiring entrepreneurs as 'one night only' specials were pitched from the stage.

My budget didn't extend to the $1000 training courses being pitched, and with Dad's wise advice of 'only bet what you are prepared to lose' popping to mind, I invested $47 in a case-study book of twenty millionaires and how they made it big on the Internet. I decided that was a good a place as any to start, but the apparent ease in which the evening's presenters made their money online had planted a seed in my restless mind. I shared much in common with where the presenters began: cash poor; career miserable; and access to the Internet. How could I go wrong?

Over the next three months I discovered nearly every way known to man (and possibly a few new ones) to lose money starting an Internet business. My meagre savings took a beating, I owned a large collection of useless domain names and the shelf above my desk flexed under the weight of useless Internet business started kits. I was getting desperate and tried everything from subliminal self-motivation recordings to visualisation exercises, but nothing was working. I felt like I was stuck, unable to jumpstart my Internet business, but terrified of letting the dream die and accepting the dismal reality of a 9-5 existence.

I was up late one night trawling through the latest posts from an Internet business start-up blog when a post title instantly caught my attention, 'How To Start Your Own Internet Business with $0 and ZERO risk'. It was a ballsy enough claim to get me to hit the link and open the full article. I had nothing to lose.

The post detailed how people with no business experience and no money were starting, and building lucrative businesses by selling things on eBay. All the people did was start small by selling unwanted things from around to create their initial cash flow. Many people stopped there, happy to have cleaned up the house and create a little extra spending money. Other players were leaving the profits in the business and rolling the dice, with the most successful ones importing goods wholesale and reselling selling them individually.

Following months of failure, I desperately wanted this to be 'the one', and hoped that what looked like such an obvious and easy way to get started in business was in fact true and not just another money pit filled with empty promises. In the end, the one thing that swayed me was there was no promise, I was totally responsible for what I chose to sell and how much money I made.

It was well past midnight when I finally switched off my monitor and padded my way to bed feeling like tomorrow was going to be the beginning of a new chapter in my life. I was going to become a professional eBay trader.

Despite my poor investments in past Internet business start-up courses, the resounding recommendation most blogs was to accelerate your results by getting training and start the eBay business with a structure. I hit Google and quickly shortlisted five companies who offered online eBay training courses. I then got to work on comparing the finer details of what each course offered. Every projected earnings statement came with an asterix and small print at the bottom of the page, but I was blind to the finer details having already bought the dream of saying goodbye to my bank job.

The top end courses were being offered for $4997 but I didn't have the guts to max out my credit card. I decided the differences in the systems couldn't be that great and continued digging to find a less financially damaging option.

Thank God for the Internet. Where there is expensive, you will always find a cheaper yet strikingly similar option on offer by someone else. In the end, $697 winner was a training course called Auction Masters, offered by a Hong Kong company run by an expat Aussie who had built one of world's largest eBay operations. With the click of a button and another hit to my credit card, the Auction Masters training kit was winging its way to Barton. I received a confirmation mail and my login to the clients only portal and was still browsing the training materials three hours with the wry grin of a man on the doorstep of success.

My smile grew wider the following week when a box containing DVD's and training manuals arrived at my work by courier. I jumped straight in the deep end and set up my eBay trading account, and eight days later, made my first sale. It was the first money I had every made outside paid work and it felt fucking great!

CHAPTER TWO

The unearthly blue light from my computer bathed the room as the cursor blinked impatiently, sending an unanswered SOS to my brain as my fingers hung in suspended animation over the keyboard. A breeze lazily pushed the long and parched grass around in the overgrown back yard, through the flaking wooden window frame and aimlessly flicked over pages from a book by 'The World's Greatest Salesman'.

My brain was paralysed by writers block and fighting desperately for the inspiration to write the sales pitch for my next eBay listing. I was still feeling positive about building a business on eBay. I had my moments of doubt but this wasn't an untried business and I wasn't the first person to attempt it. The one thing that kept me in the game was the fact I knew many others had conquered writers block and I knew I could beat it as well.

My plan eBay plan for financial independence was quite simple. There was a mountain of information available online to get me under way, so I dipped a tentative toe in the water using other people's start up success stories as a guide. I started by selling a few things from around the flat to get a feel for the moving parts behind an eBay auction. My first auctions went well and I made a healthy profit of $385.

I played a game of zeros one night and imagined the changes to my life if I could add an extra zero to my profit sheet.

One extra zero was the bond to rent a small unit and escape my mother's backyard.

Two extra zeros was enough breathing room to depart the bank and have a tilt at full-time eBay trading.

Three extra zeros was heady country, heralding the age of a new car and a new post-code in sunnier climes where twenty degrees during winter was something to grumble about.

Still, it was early days and all I needed to do was keep making sales and bringing the money in. I returned to the screen, plagiarised a whole section from the sales book and pushed on with getting the listing finished.

With the supply of personal possessions I could sell dwindling, I needed to graduate from being a seller of my own possessions, to buying things wholesale and marking them up for sale. I was taking the massive step from hobbyist to trader.

The next step in the Auction Masters process was to buy second-hand goods on the cheap and resell them for profit. The recent success of shows such as American Pickers and Garage Warriors had elevated second-hand 'picking' to an art form. I downloaded a few back episodes to brush up on my skills.

Taking a break from the TV, I headed down for a Sunday afternoon browse at the Old Bus Depot Markets on Wentworth Avenue to scope the shops and get a feel for what retail junk was going for. I arrived home with prices of a few different items and crosschecked them against eBay. They roughly matched, which told me there was money to be made if I could pick up a few items at the right price, but what items?

I scanned a few home makeover sites online and concluded that the man-cave movement was clearly booming. In addition to 63-inch TV's and corner bars, old signs, movie posters, garage memorabilia and stuffed animal hunting trophies were all high on the must-have list. The antique shop at the markets had a fine, yet ridiculously expensive and menagerie of stuffed animals available for sale. Glassy eyed stags, birds on boards, bacon-less pigs and fish long out of water carried price tags, which screamed opportunity to me. A quick eBay search confirmed my gut-feel that trophy animals were a hit ticket item.

My taxidermy inspired garage hunt started early on Saturday with a scan of the garage sale listings in the Canberra Times. Over a steaming cup of coffee I scanned the listings for the sales offering the widest array of goods for sale in the hope the gold I was chasing was half-buried and ignored on a dusty back table. The plan was to hit hard and fast, scan the sales and move on quickly if there was nothing on offer. I fired up my battered blue Hyundai and hit the suburbs.

With six dusty and junk filled garage sales behind me, I discovered the beast of my dreams at garage sale seven. I spotted a flash of reddish-brown fur high on a shelf in a garage belonging to a stoic Hungarian woman who was clearly disinterested in parting ways with any item for less that the ticket price. The negotiations were awkward but I refused to walk away as there was profit to be made at the right price.

In the end, sanity prevailed; Miss Budapest 1948 relented and begrudgingly accepted my last and final offer. While my trophy wasn't the room-dominating ferocious beast I went searching for, there was still a profit to be made at the right sale price. Looking over to the passenger seat on the drive home, my wing-man was now a Fox called Tyler standing proudly with his front legs on a log in a very unnatural pose.

I stared intensely at the screen, desperately sweating on a creative flash to help me finish Tyler's eBay listing. I stared at the mangy fox for inspiration, but Tyler continued