Jim Frago works full time as a consultant, but wants to start a part-time business to build a nest egg for retirement.
Charles L. C'DeBaca just sold one successful business and is casting about for the next.
And Anita Arms has a lot of collectibles sitting in her attic that she wants to sell.
Opportunity, all three said, could be just a mouse click away on the Web site of the 11th-largest retailer: eBay.
To find out how to get started, they joined more than 200 people earlier this week for one of six free eBay University "7 Days to Cash Flow" seminars at the Marriott Crystal Gateway in Arlington.
Run by Jack Brannelly, a Salt Lake City lawyer turned eBay Power Seller, the sessions were part information and part infomercial for a $1,249 workshop on how to build a business on the e-marketplace giant.
An eBay-based business can be lucrative, he told the curious crowd. Its 114 million users already have racked up $40 billion in sales so far this year, and about 430,000 of them earn their living selling online full time.
The beauty of eBay, Brannelly said, is that it doesn't take much to get started. More than 80 percent of novice sellers begin by posting things they find around the house, pick up at yard sales or buy at closeout sales, according to a Nielsen poll commissioned by eBay.
One seller, for example, listed a souvenir purchased while on vacation as a "Rare Alaska Starbucks mug" and made a tidy profit, he said.
"Once you start selling on eBay, vacations are no longer vacations, they're 'product prospecting trips'--and you can use them as a tax deduction," Brannelly said.
Money from initial sales can be used as startup capital to buy items at dozens of places that sell at wholesale or below, such as Costco or even eBay itself, Brannelly said.
"Some serious sellers look under [the eBay Buy listing for] 'Wholesale, bulk lots' and buy whole pallets," he said. "They use them to make gift baskets and things like that."
The most popular items are no longer collectibles, which made up 60 percent of eBay's business when it started in 1995. Now they're the so-called "practicals," or practical items people need, Brannelly said.
EBay's car division, eBay Motors, for example, tops the list with $9.8 billion in sales. The runner-up is consumer electronics, with $2.5 billion in sales. The computers category follows close behind with $2.4 billion in sales, he said.
Top sellers--those who earn eBay's coveted Power Seller status--not only know how to find good products to sell, they also know how to make their auctions simple and streamline shipping and packaging, said Brannelly.
The key is to pick a user name that reflects their business, list it in the correct category, add a tightly cropped picture and include words in the title line that will get as many hits as possible.
"Don't use 'WOW' and 'Beautiful!' Brannelly said. "Nobody searches for a 'wow' or a 'beautiful.'"
He also recommended researching what similar items are selling for before picking a starting price, ending the auction during the early evening when buying peaks, and adding a free page counter to see how many hits the listing gets.
"If you don't get many hits, the listing may have misspellings or it may be in the wrong category," Brannelly said.
Once an item is sold, the easiest way to ship it is to get someone else to do it, he said. It's a technique called "drop and ship."
Brannelly, for example, sells leather theater seating online, then pays the manufacturer both for the product and to slap on a shipping label with his return address and mail it.
"Serious sellers streamline shipping and packaging," he said.
That isn't always easy, said Paul Cymrot, who runs Riverby Books in downtown Fredericksburg. He's been selling used books on eBay and other Web sites since 1998.
"It's maybe a third of our business," he said while working at his shop recently. "EBay is much more labor-intensive than some of the other sites. You have to write a description and upload a picture, and the auction only lasts a week."
At Amazon.com and Abebooks .com, he just has to type in the ISBN--a unique identifying number for each book title--and the listing stays up until someone buys it.
"What seems to sell is oddball stuff," Cymrot said. "We've always had good luck with sideshow performers, Mormons and fraternities. The Masons are hot, too, and the market is flooded with signed Julia Child stuff."
Former Spotsylvania County resident Pat Burdette, however, has had great luck using the beaded, leather thong necklaces she lists on eBay to direct buyers to her Web site, neckthongs.com.
Burdette and her husband, J.R. Burdette, who ran the real estate company MBM Land Sales in Fredericksburg for 18 years, became familiar with eBay when they used it to auction off a sports car and some antiques before they retired to Marco Island, Fla.
So when a friend suggested she sell some of the unique leather necklaces she was making with semiprecious beads, listing them on eBay seemed a natural step.
"I just list them individually, and link it to my Web site. I get a lot of sales that way because I have so much more than what's on eBay," Burdette said from her Marco Island home.
Like Brannelly, she's found that it pays to put an accurate description and a clear photograph on each listing. And, she said, sellers need to be prepared to answer lots of e-mailed questions. She gets about 10 to 15 a day.
"If they want more photographs, you have to take more and e-mail them," Burdette said. "If they want to know what's it going to cost to ship it, I either have to charge a flat rate or get their ZIP code, get the package weighed and give them a quote. All that can take time."
EBay is starting to offer more options to make selling easier, Brannelly said at the seminar. Among them is a shipping calculator that buyers can add to listings for free.
"That would be useful," Burdette said when told about the new feature. "That's for sure."
To find eBay University's schedule of seminars, click on pages.ebay.com/university
To reach CATHY JETT: 540/374-5407 cjett@freelancestar.com