Happy ebay anniversary to me!

[disneysteve]

Yesterday was the 19th anniversary of joining ebay. I got an email from them acknowledging that which I thought was nice, though the stats they gave in that email were wrong. It said my first sale was 12/9/01. I'm positive that's incorrect. I joined in 1997 and started selling immediately. By 2001 I was actually tapering off. My peak sales period was in 2000 when I was out of work and running 100 auctions at all times, grossing a couple thousand dollars per month in sales.

[Joan.of.the.Arch]

That's a long ebay history. Sometimes when I look back on internet stuff, it seems impossible that my involvement with it could possibly be so old now.

I checked on my ebay registration. I registered May 26, 1998. Before that I used my husband's account. I remember making my own account so I could buy books for my 10 year old without bothering my husband.

It has been a six years since I used ebay.

In the early days of my ebay use, it was pleasant and bargains were to be had. Sometimes there would be a genuine chat between buyers and sellers. I remember after I bought a book about a certain river for my son who had an interest in rivers in general, the seller told me that a friend of his had written a book that might interest my kid. Out of the blue a few weeks later he sent that book along with an historical novel centered on a river. He just did it because he knew there was a kid who was interested. Just kindness, not a sale.

I'll tell ya-- in the early days, my husband bought a boat off of ebay, at a good price of course. The seller even drove it here several hundred miles as we did not yet have a vehicle ready to tow. Maybe we were lucky, but ebay back then seemed more like person to person sales-- emphasis on PERSONS, if you know what I mean.