Secrets of the eBay

138 Secrets of the eBay Millionaires
“I Went from Shoe Salesman to Software Developer”
“I used to think I was too old to be in online business,” says David, who
is 60 years old. “It turned out that not only am I not too old, but I could be
a pioneer in a lot of ways.” One of the ways in which he pioneered was in
software development—ironic, considering that he didn’t know much about
computers when he first began selling on eBay. “I realized something,” he
says. “In our regular wholesale business we go into a store and find shoes
we can resell. If I go online, all I need is the niche.”
As it turned out, the niche of selling men’s and women’s name-brand
shoes at cut-rate prices was made for Hardin. His sales continued to
shoot up as he tried Turbo Lister, Selling Manager, and one third-party
auction sales tool after another. Before long, Hardin discovered that he had
“broken” all of the software programs he had tried to use to manage his
sales—in other words, the number of transactions he was conducting and
the complexity of the data was more than the software could handle. He
made a daring decision: he would try to invent his own eBay sales software.
“Streamlined is the way eBay’s got to be,” he says. “We counted up
35 separate business steps that it takes to complete a sale on eBay. We
saw immediately that we couldn’t make a profit if we had to go through
that number of steps, with all the labor involved. We worked with all the
PSPs—Auctionworks, Andale—when we got up to a certain point, we broke
them. We created our own software where we took 35 business steps and
boiled them down to 9. The software lets you record the bar code, track the
physical inventory, and show the location of the item in our warehouse.”
“If You’ve Got a Computer and a High-Speed Internet
Connection, You Can Do This Out of Your Home”: eSAVz
When he became a successful PowerSeller on eBay, David Hardin
discovered that he had a saleable commodity to offer the public that had
nothing to do with shoes or fashion. He had his own knowledge and
experience—not to mention his considerable skill as a salesman—that he
could provide to others who wanted to learn how to sell on eBay.
The idea of becoming a Trading Assistant has appealed to him, but not
to one or two individuals at a time. For several years, he has been pitching
his company’s services as an eBay Trading Assistant to large companies in
countries as far-flung as China, Korea, and Peru.
He also came up with eSAVz and partnered with Brad Young and
Mike Hopkins, owners of the software company DevSource, to form an
eBay franchising business (http://www.esavz.com, shown in Figure 7-3).
eSAVz enables individual eBay sellers to become drop-off store operators,