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eBay. I admit that I’ve purchased several items through eBay, but not through the auctions that made eBay a household name. I’ve bought stuff through eBay “stores” -- virtual storefronts set up by some folks who have lots of things to sell but don’t want to deal with customers face-to-face. In other words, my kind of retailers.

The auctions, however, have always been a mystery; mostly due to my ignorance of how they worked. I’ve seen folks sell some pretty stupid stuff for some remarkably large sums of cash; but I also know some folks are even more unscrupulous than they might look. Still, if people could swap junk for real American Money, why not me?

After almost a year of thinking about selling stuff on eBay, I decided to take the plunge. I had a couple old “data cards” (or memory cards) that I would never use again. They’re for a now-obsolete model of Garmin GPS. Maybe someone, somewhere might want ‘em enough to at least pay for the postage to get them.

I proceeded to spend hours and hours researching the process, and it looked fairly simple. Well, as simple as learning an entirely new language and mentally assembling a dozen odd-shaped puzzle pieces. Let’s see... you just:

• Set up an account on eBay. Name, address, E-mail, phone numbers, ... that kind of stuff. Easy.

• Set up PayPal account. That’s essentially a financial go-between service (undoubtedly very lucrative for them) to handle payments. They, too, want all that personal information. But they also want credit card account numbers and other normally private information that you hate to part with. But they CAN be trusted, right? After all, they’re doing business on the Internet, and we all know how safe that is.

• Tie the two aforementioned accounts together so the eBay account and the PayPal account can talk to each other and exchange my money whenever they feel like it.

• Oh, and now you get to tie your PayPal account to your bank account “for verification” purposes. Maybe other reasons, too -- I'll discover those as I go along, no doubt. Hey, what harm could it do to give them your bank account numbers?

• Review everything you’ve entered into both those accounts, and try to find where you may have screwed something up. Good luck!

• Now decide what physical object(s) you want to part with. You have to assume that there re probably only two outcomes from this endeavor: a) everything will work and you’ll actually SELL something for money (yippee!); or b) you’ll screw something up and lose money and the object you were trying to sell. So no matter what you do, the object you picked is gonna be history.

• Create the sale item on eBay. Click a link, then fill in the form. Sounds easy. But you have to get all that information together ahead of time; item descriptions, part numbers, quality descriptors, sales options, and such. Oh, and pictures. You need pictures. And as you enter each bit of information, you must decide, “Is this something I want to pay extra for?” (eBay offers scores of options, most of which cost just a few pennies more! So it’s true here; it takes money to make money.)

• Finally, post the item and sit back and watch the auction.

One of your choices is to select the length of your option. Most folks apparently choose 7- or 10-day auction periods. That ensures that people who only check eBay once a week will have a chance to see your item. (People who check only once a week are the ones who shop from home. Most folks check eBay daily during the week -- while at work, where they’re getting paid by their employer to be doing something else, of course.)

Then the excitement begins! Your items just sits there. No bids, no interest, no hope. Like a mongrel 6-month-old mutant puppy in a run-down, small-town shelter. Nobody seems to want it. But as the end of your auction draws near, you see some activity. People start asking questions; Can you ship to Spain? How much to ship it to Australia? (Actual questions.) Can they be rewritten? (I really, really wanted to answer that one, “Of course they can, you stupid shit. And if you had to ask that question, you’re obviously not smart enough to use these anyway, so just go away.” I didn’t, of course. At least not in writing.)

My little items sat there for more than 9 days, with bidding that started at 99 cents. It got a first bid of $35 on about Day 5, and finally worked up to $65 by Day 9. But in the final moments of the sale, a flurry of activity! There were three bids that bumped the price up to $91 in the final 26 seconds! These eBay shoppers must not have a life, either.

The bidding now closed, you weave your way through some obvious -- and some obscure -- menus to contact the winner of the auction and to send an invoice. Then you wait, hoping the buyer actually pays for the item they’d won. But, Hey . . . it’s free money. So don’t worry about it. Right?

In my case, my eBay account said the buyer paid, so it must be okay. Now all I gotta do is ship it. Right?

Not wanting to cut my eBay experience short, I took another step into new territory. With a single mouse click, you can create a postage-paid mailing label right on your computer and printer. I tried it, and it appeared to work; but only after my heart skipped a few beats as I envisioned charging the $5.80 in fees to my credit card only to see my printer jam up and spit out some mangled, worthless spitwad of paper and ink. To my relief, it worked. (You realize, of course, that to print an actual “label” you’d need to have a sticky-backed “label” on which to print in the first place, don’t you? But I’m too cheap. Plain paper worked -- with the help of some tape.)

In the end, my net profit from this sale was about $83 -- for items I would never use again anyway. None too shabby.

So, Where’s that money now? . . . No, I’m asking. Where’s that money now? Will it be in eBay? In PayPal? In my credit card or checking account? Or behind Door Number 3?
I feel like I’ve been swept away in some strange, high-tech, high-energy form of Three Card Monte. “Where’s the money? Now you see it, now you don’t.”

I can see that balance sitting there in my PayPal account; but now what? I’ll eventually have to figure out how to get the money back to ME! I'll worry about that after I give my brain a nice long rest.

And then maybe I'll try selling another item or two! Maybe.