She sells sea shells on the E-Bay not too far from the sea shore

E-Bay has launched its Sin­ga­pore por­tal. So I sup­pose that means I’ll rum­mage through my room to see what I can sell that peo­ple who have lost their mar­bles will buy. (Replace­ment mar­bles, maybe).

When online trad­ing first appeared (online), I went on a ram­page, putting things up for sale left, right and cen­tre. And sold all of them too. DIY books (how to make your own kayak, wood­work­ing ency­clopae­dia, how to make your own fish­ing lures), rac­quets, hunt­ing bows, home-made fish­ing lures. You name it, I’ve bought it — things I never really needed — and I’ve sold it, to peo­ple who, while online, sud­denly decide they need DIY books, rac­quets, hunt­ing bows and home made lures. It was great. I had a trad­ing account of good stand­ing on this site called GoFish (Aus­tralia), it had noth­ing to do with fish­ing, all to do with online sell­ing, and unfor­tu­nately for them, not much to do with profit. My infat­u­a­tion with sell­ing triv­ial mis­cel­lany online died with the com­pany some time in 1999.

My entre­pre­neur­ial streak was over­shad­owed by my brother’s far greater tech know-how at that time. He had, I swear, one of the world’s first CD burn­ers, and together with a part-time DJ part time drag queen friend of his, com­piled audio CDs of Madonna’s great­est hits, and sold them online to Amer­i­cans who shelled out US$25 for each pirated CD! He made so much money he bought a 4X CD burner, which he used to make more CDs faster.

Unfor­tu­nately for my brother, his was one of the many sto­ries of suc­cess lead­ing to greed lead­ing to unsound busi­ness deci­sion lead­ing to end of success.

Instead of stick­ing with the tried and tested mar­ket favourites, he decided to ‘make’ and sell pirated ser­ial VCDs of every episode of every Star Trek tele­vi­sion series ever made. Apart from tap­ping the (to him) sur­pris­ingly small nerd mar­ket, he couldn’t make enough to put towards his enor­mous cap­i­tal out­lay of rent­ing from the video shop every sin­gle video­tape of every Star Trek episode ever made.

He and his friend never part­nered on another (pirate) ven­ture. His friend was last seen behind the clerk’s counter at the local Ezy Video library at Katoomba. Whether or not he’s a drag pirate still, I don’t know. I haven’t heard any reports of whether he’s been added to the Three Sis­ters either.

A friend who caught the online sell­ing wave and has been surf­ing it ever since is the great­est exem­plar of how one can make a tidy sum sell­ing to idiots. She can sell any damned thing and turn in a profit. If I remem­ber cor­rectly, she last sold one of her used pair of sneak­ers. She’s also bought things from me and sold them for a profit. Like my car for instance.

It has just dawned on me that the secret of her suc­cess is that she buys things from idiots first.