NEW YORK, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Online auctioneer eBay Inc. (EBAY.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Tuesday it had completed its purchase of Shopping.com (SHOP.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and expects the acquisition will be dilutive to 2005 net earnings per share.

eBay said the purchase for about $634 million, or $21 a share, in cash would be dilutive due to incremental charges for stock-based compensation and amortization of acquired intangible assets. Excluding certain items, the company said the acquisition would be immaterial to earnings.

eBay in June said it agreed to buy Shopping.com, which provides online comparison shopping and consumer reviews, to strengthen its ability to bring consumers online comparison shopping, a service dabbled in by Internet search engine Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research)

The Belfast Telegraph and Sinn Fein are leading a campaign belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=659170 to KO eBay auctions of DVD bare-knuckle gypsy-on-gypsy fight action. The newspaper has already provoked eBay.co.uk to pull two auctions for such material, although there is plenty of raw footage still available to eager punters, such as this sale (Gypsy Fight) (soon to be counted out, we have no doubt), which declares: This is Real Bare Knuckle Gypsy Fights on DVD! Over two hours of Gypsys punching the hell out of each other and shouting stuff that you wont be able to understand!

Filmed in England, Ireland and Scotland in country lanes, warehouses and front gardens! This is real footage all caught on camcorder, so dont expect hollywood quality. Just like the film Snatch, only this is for real! A 100% Genuine Gypsy production comes on a disc like the one pictured below. No sleave, bare disc of Bare Knuckle Fights! After getting the Belfast Telegraph tip about two similar promotions, an eBay spokesperson told the paper: "These items contravene eBay listings policy and our customer service teams ended the auctions as soon as the Belfast Telegraph alerted us to them." For its part, Sinn Fein has condemned the DVDs as "racist incitement to hatred".

The organisation's spokesperson on human rights (yes, you read that right), Catriona Ruane, said "members of the Travelling community were not the only people to be exploited in this way", citing the example of the scandalous US Bumfights bumfights.com/, where you can see "real bums trade blows on the streets, chick fights, bum stunts, sick pranks, crime caught on tape, crackheads, street fights, supermodel Angela Taylor, and hands down the rawest, most core ruckus ever filmed". What, no "supermodel Naomi Campbell battering her PA theregister.co.uk/2005/03/31/pda_beating _claim/theregister.co.uk/2005/03/31/pda_beating _claim/ with a PDA"?

That's a real shame, although not according to Ruane who rather marvellously continues: "We [Sinn Fein] are against the exploitation of violence in any way." There is, nonetheless, a legitimate legal point to be made here. A Traveller's support group in Belfast said it "did not condone the sale and was concerned that eBay could effectively be profiting from an illegal event". Which is true, 'cos bare-knuckle boxing is illegal in the UK, unless you're John "Slugger" Prescott, in which case you can punch away with impunity and the TV can run the footage to its heart's content. Stateside, meanwhile, the ne'er-do-wells behind Bumfights earned signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050210/ne ws_2m10bumfight.html themselves some jailtime back in February after failing to do 280 hours of community service work after they pleaded guilty in June 2003 to misdemeanor charges of conspiracy to stage an illegal fight.

David Hung Truong, 36, pleaded guilty Thursday to one count of wire fraud as part of a plea agreement with federal prosecutors. He faces a maximum of 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines when he's sentenced Jan. 5, 2006.

As part of the plea agreement, Truong admitted opening several bank accounts that received payments for the cars listed on eBay. Prosecutors said the scheme, which operated from October 2003 to January 2004, defrauded victims of more than $40,000.

We found this gem featured over at StrangeeBay.com. These eBay pulse items are getting weirder and weirder...

How About A Snoopy Pancake ?

Click Here!

As the summer sadly winds down, we here at ECommerce Guide would like to bring some cheer to our readers this week. The weekend is here, and a three-day weekend comes up next. What a better way to celebrate than downing a few cold ones with your friends?

Beer has been all over the headlines this week. Looting broke out in South Africa after a beer transport train carrying 180,000 crates of beer derailed. A beer drinking survey in Germany has German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder leading his political opponent. The "Vote With Your Throat" shows the chancellor with a 117 pint lead over opposition leader Angela Merkel. And the college town of Muncie, Indiana - home to Ball State University - is in mourning over a decision by local liquor stores to stop selling kegs this year.

So let's get this party started eBay style!

Before the golden lager is even poured, you of course need a glass. Check out this set of authentic German beer glasses we found. Seller lindseysgumma has a lot of three German Beer Glasses: a Schwaben Brau Pils 0.3 l rastal 9" tall, Wacfteiner Premium verum 0.2 rastal 8" tall, and Bitburger Pils 0.4 l rastal 9 1/2" tall. No cracks or chips - all in great shape. Perfect!
If that's not enough for you, look no further. Seller loebeske has a set of six Corsendonk beer glasses - with a huge vinyl beer glass sign as a bonus!

Are your friends tired of you complaining you can't find a girlfriend to party with? Boy, do we have the girl for you! Get your one-of-a-kind Keystone Light "super sexy girl stand up."

She'll be the cheapest date you've ever had and leave your buddies talking about her for days. She might even be able to get you into that trendy SoHo club you've been excluded from since your college days. For only $10.99, she can be yours.

So you grab a few bottle of your favorite brew, hand them to your buddies and they look at you like you're nuts. What's wrong? Well, Sammy Adams, you forgot you pop the tops. You lost your bottle opener again, didn't you? Make sure this doesn't happen anymore by buying a few extra bottle openers on eBay!

Go "old school" with a vintage 7" Corona bottle opener made of wood. Or, how about a nice set of cast iron openers from Australia for next to nothing?

Finally, what would a summer party be without the ultimate accessory? That's right, we're talking about the classic beer guzzler helmet. As if one can of cold brew wasn't enough, enjoy double-fisting that tasty can-fresh taste of Grolsch or Meister Brau for less than $20. Mmm mmm, good!

eBay News This Week
What better way to stretch out that summer vacation than with a cruise? Between now and September 30, 2005, eBay Stores is offering the chance to win a 5-day Carribean Cruise for two for entering the Shop eBay Stores Sweepstakes. Detail can be found at ebay.com/shopebaystores/

Those of you living in the Pacific Northwest have something exciting to look forward to in the coming weeks. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, beginning next week, the U.S. Postal Service is hosting "eBay Days" at four Seattle locations. "The free events, a series of hour-long presentations that anyone can attend, will teach the public about how to become an eBay entrepreneur and how to use (guess who?) the Postal Service to do so," says the report.

There are also reports that eBay and the USPS are teaming up in Denver and other areas of the country as part of their newfound love affair announced at eBay Live! in June. Who knew you could have so much fun at the post office?

Jennifer Aniston has been left terrified after a man broke into her Californian home.

David Hesterby was allegedly discovered walking through the living room of the actress' luxurious mansion, in Malibu, by shocked staff who confronted him before contacting police.

Officers raced to the property to find the 48-year-old man fleeing the house and after a brief chase along Malibu beach he was arrested and charged with trespassing.

Luckily, the former 'Friends' beauty was not at home at the time of the break-in - she is currently in Chicago shooting new movie 'The Break Up' - but was reportedly left distraught after hearing of the incident over the phone.

Lat week, Aniston was forced to hire a team of security guards after discovering her underwear had been stolen from the set of her new movie and sold on eBay.

The sexy star was horrified after finding a pervert had broken into her trailer and made off with her bras and knickers.

The items later appeared on the popular internet auction site.

Aniston's private movie quarters are now being guarded round-the-clock and it is alleged she is now considering beefing up security at her home after the break-in.

LONDON, England (UPI) -- A swan dress worn by eccentric Icelandic singer Bjork will be in the lineup in an Internet charity auction benefiting Oxfam.

The memorable creation, which Bjork wore to cause a stir at the 2001 Oscars ceremony, is one of many celebrity garments being auctioned off on the charity section of eBay.

Bjork donated the dress in response to a request for an item of clothing "with a story behind it."

Famous names such as designers John Galliano and Alexander McQueen and singer/songwriter Patti Smith also donated items which were then worn in a fashion shoot by Naomi Campbell and Erin OConnor, and Kylie Minogues dancers.

With his 12-year-old son navigating, Mark Stilwell has made about a dozen cross-country trips in the past few years picking up cars he purchased on Internet auction site eBay.
 
  Martha Fligor, 69, rides in her 1998 Indianapolis 500 Corvette pace car that she bought sight unseen on eBay Motors for $36,500.  
By J. Kyle Keener for USA TODAY

He turns the journeys into learning adventures for Eric and his 13-year-old brother, Shane, stopping at roadside stands, county fairs, even Niagara Falls.

Stilwell, 44, of Livonia, Mich., has hit 46 states in his car-buying journeys, with only New Mexico and Mississippi in the continental USA left to go.

Like Stilwell, more people are turning to eBay to buy cars. They are hankering for a road trip or searching for a hard-to-find model or hunting for a potential great deal.

Buying a used car long-distance may seem crazy, considering the things that can go wrong even if you've bought one from your next-door neighbor. But eBay says its formula — letting people bid up to the price they want to pay, allowing space for buyers and sellers to air their grievances when a transaction goes wrong, and offering limited guarantees in case vehicles are truly lemons — attracts buyers. Buyers can read feedback on sellers, and a seller who draws too many complaints can be kicked off the site.

Fans say the site is better than searching through classified ads, because sellers can post dozens of pictures of the vehicle. And to preserve their reputations, sellers usually spell out every nick, scratch and rattle in extreme detail.

EBay Motors has sold more than 1 million cars since 2000, when the company realized so many people were selling vehicles through eBay that it set up a separate auction site. Although eBay won't say how many cars it expects to sell this year, it says a car is sold through eBay Motors every minute. Nearly 75% are sold to long-distance buyers.

Stilwell started buying late-1960s muscle cars in 2002 and got hooked. He bought two cars from the same dealer in California, a 1969 Plymouth Road Runner and a 1969 Plymouth Satellite. His travels then took him to Maryland, Idaho, Washington, New York, Florida, Texas, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. Last week, he headed to Illinois for yet another car. He says he's driven them all home except in a couple of cases in which he bought two from the same dealer and towed one.

The collector stores some at a warehouse he owns for his resale business. The rest are on property he says is private enough to keep neighbors from complaining.

EBay Motors charges $40 for a basic listing and another $40 if a car gets bids. Once bidding is done, completing the transaction, including financing and title exchange, is up to the buyer and seller.

"Our process really allows a customer to get more comfortable with a car," says Drew Lieberman, senior director of eBay Motors. "In some ways, there's less pressure than buying a used car the traditional way."

History: In 1998, Simon Rothman, a business development strategist at eBay, went looking for a die-cast model of a Ferrari and discovered real ones were for sale on the site. In 2000, the company launched eBay Motors, and Rothman is its vice president.
Revenue: $93 million in 2004 from car and truck sales.

Transactions: $3.9 billion worth of vehicles traded hands on eBay motors in 2004.

Visits: 10 million unique visitors to eBay Motors each month.

Top five late-model cars sold on eBay this month:

 Ford Mustang
 Chevrolet Corvette
 Chevrolet Camaro
 Dodge Ram
 BMW 3 Series

Top five classic cars sold on eBay this month:

 Ford Mustang
 Chevrolet Camaro
 Chevrolet Corvette
 Chevrolet Chevelle
 Volkswagen Beetle

Milestone: 1 million vehicles were sold on eBay as of April 24, 2004. The millionth car — a 2003 Honda Odyssey sold in Virginia to a North Carolina man — was paid for by eBay.
 
For Martha Fligor, 69, of Dayton, Ohio, eBay Motors helped fulfill a longtime dream: owning a Chevrolet Corvette that had been an Indianapolis 500 pace car. Fligor's grandson, Bruce Bryan, who shares her passion for Corvettes and owns the car with her, spotted a purple and yellow 1998 Corvette pace car on eBay in December 2002. The car was in Massachusetts, but it didn't matter. Fligor hit the "buy it now" button and purchased it for $36,500. EBay says a Corvette is sold on the site every 47 minutes.

'People told me I was crazy'

Fligor, who had the car shipped to her house, sounds like a giddy teenager talking about it. "People told me I was crazy to do this, buy a car sight unseen," she says. "But it was such a great adventure. I had a lot of confidence in the place that I bought it from. ... I saw some Ferraris in the background (of the photos) and that made me think they were good people to deal with."

Jeff Bryan, editor at Edmunds.com, an Internet site that guides car buyers, says consumers are attracted by the no-pressure environment on eBay Motors. It's an "easy and casual way of just browsing for cars," says Bryan, who has purchased three cars on eBay. "You can take two hours to look at the photos if you want."

Not everybody is enamored of the eBay car-buying process. Only 14% of buyers surveyed by CNW Marketing Research this year say they'll use eBay Motors again, down from 22% last year. Comparatively, 40% of AutoTrader.com's users say they'll come back, up from 38%. AutoTrader, another venue for used cars, operates more like the classified section of a newspaper.

Art Spinella, president of CNW, says buyers have high expectations of eBay Motors because of the reputation of its parent group. "People expect other sites, like AutoTrader, to be more like buying a car from the classified section. Everybody expects in a classified that the seller is exaggerating. But they believe in an auction that a seller has a better idea of what the problems might be, and they're not really looking to get taken advantage of."

An unhappy camper

Steve Homer, 40, of Concord, N.H., probably won't use eBay to buy another car. In the market for a pickup without rust problems, he found the selection on eBay "much better than the want ads. And each had several pictures, if not dozens."

The low bidder on a 1998 Nissan Frontier, he purchased a $180 one-way ticket to Cleveland and flew out to pick up the truck at the end of July. During the test drive, the engine sounded a little louder than he expected, but for $3,075, Homer says, it wasn't worth complaining about. Similar trucks go for about $3,700.

Fifty miles into his 700-mile trip home, the check-engine light came on. Annoying, Homer says, but not a big enough problem to turn around. A few hundred miles later, he turned down the radio to make a phone call, and the radio never turned back on. And then — although Homer admits this isn't the truck's fault — he couldn't find a hotel room as easily as he hoped.

"I drove past 3 in the morning," he says, sounding defeated.

"The battery's since died, and I don't even know if I'm going to keep this truck now," he says. Including the pricey hotel room he eventually found and the repairs, Homer says he's spent about $4,200 on the truck and the trip.

Despite his trouble, Homer says, "I think eBay has got it set up about as well as such a thing can be done. It's an inherently risky transaction, even if you do it the old-fashioned way."

The search for a bargain is what attracts many buyers to eBay. And that's what turned Ed Koon, a Clearwater, Fla., dealer, off from the site. Koon started selling cars on eBay in 1999, before eBay Motors, and at that time thought "the site was the best thing to happen to the car business."

Now, he says, "It's nothing but a doggone garbage dump."

"Everybody wants everything so cheap," he says. "... And then you hear complaints that it didn't work right. Well, what did you expect? You bought it for half of the book value."

A different business

Micah Watts, a dealer in Duluth, Ga., says his business would be completely different if he didn't have eBay. Before he started using eBay Motors, it could take Gwinnett Place Ford nine or 10 months to sell a high-end Ford Mustang.

Now, Watts says, the dealership is selling about 15 high-end cars a month, and turning a profit on them all.

"We do well with them, we really do," he says. "We do well with them because it's niche stuff. When you've got a product that everybody else down the street doesn't have, it works."

Edmunds.com's Bryan says buyers going to eBay strictly for a bargain are likely to be disappointed in some way. Either they won't find a car for the price they're looking for, or when they find that vehicle, it won't perform as smoothly as they hoped.

Also, finding a good bargain isn't going to be easy: Buyers are competing against a nation of shoppers also bidding on cars.

"If it's really going to give you an ulcer, then just don't bother," Bryan says. "Go to a dealership and do it the traditional way."

There are safeguards built into eBay that consumers should take advantage of, Bryan says. The first is the feedback scoring tool, where anyone can see what buyers and sellers have to say about their experience with the person listing or bidding on an item.

Many eBayers protect their feedback score, which goes down every time someone gives negative feedback, by doing whatever they can to make the other person in a transaction happy. If that means refunding money to someone who's not happy with a dent on the side of a car, the seller will likely work something out.

"Anything less than 100% positive feedback, I would look at the comments to see what happened," Bryan says.

What to look for

Bryan also suggests looking for descriptions that detail seemingly every nick and possible problem with a vehicle, because unless the car is brand new, it's going to have some issues. And he suggests taking advantage of services which, for a couple hundred dollars, will send an inspector to comb over the vehicle and report back.

That's what Da-Wyone Haynes, 36, of Louisville, did when he bought a Buick Rendezvous in Clearwater earlier this month. The Rendezvous' seller, who has more than 650 sales on eBay, had a 99.3% positive feedback score.

Haynes checked the SUV's history on Carfax, which runs the vehicle identification number through a national registry and can detect whether a car has been in a serious accident. Before bidding, Haynes paid about $100 to have an inspector check out the SUV.

He then flew to Florida to pick it up, squeezing in a trip to visit his father. "It went well," Haynes said, after driving the Rendezvous around over the weekend. "It's on par with what I expected it would be."

Even though Stilwell has had some disappointments, he plans to continue buying used cars on eBay and traveling with his sons to pick them up.

He says it's almost as much about bonding with his boys in a way he never got to with his own dad, who worked 70- to 80-hour weeks at a Chrysler plant in Michigan and never traveled.

"That's part of the reason I pick all these long-distance ones," says Stilwell. "The travel is half the fun. I'm just trying to show my boys what I didn't have as a child."

Former Cingular Employee Reportedly Involved

The U.S. Postal Service is trying hard -- real hard -- to get and keep eBay's business.

Beginning next week, the U.S. Postal Service is hosting "eBay Days" at four Seattle locations.

The free events, a series of hour-long presentations that anyone can attend, will teach the public about how to become an eBay entrepreneur and how to use (guess who?) the Postal Service to do so.

"We will be teaching customers how to be online retailers," said Mariea Taylor, the customer relations coordinator for the Postal Service's Seattle district. "As part of the big picture, this is one of the avenues we're taking to generate revenue and to get customers to come here rather than FedEx or UPS."

Attendees will get a free CD-ROM with more detailed instructions and will be able to ask questions, Taylor said.

The Postal Service began its partnership with eBay in 2003, three years after private carrier UPS began a similar relationship with eBay.

By last year, the Postal Service and eBay had launched an integrated mailing system which allows eBay users to calculate postage, print postage labels, pay for insurance, and request carrier pickup from their "My eBay" Web page.

The Postal Service said that its services are already used by 75 percent of the 125 million-plus registered eBay users.

Nationally, more than 724,000 people report that eBay is their primary or secondary source of income, according to a recent survey from ACNielsen International Research.

But the Postal Service saw the volume of first-class mail drop to 97.93 billion in 2004, down from 99.01 in 2003. Priority mail volume dropped to 848.6 million pieces, down from 859.6 million pieces in 2003.

Though a postal spokesman declined to specify how much business eBay generates for the Postal Service, the Postal Service has added a number of services in the past few years to attract high-volume shippers such as eBay vendors.

"For customers who don't have time to go to the post office, we have carrier pickup," Taylor said.

After weighing their package, customers can go online to usps.com to calculate postage, print a paid shipping label, and then schedule a free pickup to avoid waiting at the post office.

For merchants attempting to notify customers of a new offer or sale, there is NetPost Print & Mail Service, where visitors to the Postal Service Web site can forward booklets or flyers and create custom postcards, letters and newsletters that are sent directly to the addresses they specify.

The Postal Service also introduced two new, flat-rate boxes for priority mail shipments based on feedback from eBay customers, according to Jim Griffith, eBay's "dean of education."

Some locations also have automated postal centers from which customers can ship packages and buy stamps.

But that's not enough for eBay merchant Vernon White, a Burien artist who has sold his abstract expressionist work on eBay for three years under the name Vblast.

A steady UPS user for the past three years, White dislikes that the Postal Service does not offer tracking on ground shipments, though it does have delivery and signature confirmation.

"A lot of eBay sellers like the Postal Service because it's usually cheaper than the others," said White, referring to comments he's seen on eBay discussion boards. "But I use it very seldom, except on international shipments, when it is considerably cheaper."

Meanwhile, Atlanta-based UPS is continuing its efforts to lure the lucrative eBay business. UPS customers can also calculate costs and print labels directly from the eBay site.

IF YOU GO

EBay Days are from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in postal facility lobbies, except for a more extensive event Sept. 14 at Seattle Pacific University.

Britain may no longer be a nation of shopkeepers but it seems we are still a nation of buyers and sellers. According to the latest research by web traffic analysts Nielsen/Netratings, over half of the UK's online population visits the eBay online marketplace at least once a month.
According to the Nielsen research, almost 11 million individual people visited the eBay site in July 2005, which represents a steep a 30 per cent rise from July 2004. Part of the rise can be attributed to the TV campaign that has been running on British television, but the growth has been on an upward curve for some time.

At the beginning of this year eBay UK announced its 10 millionth registered user, which represented a doubling of users in a year.

Although the Web is seen as mostly the preserve of the under 35s, eBay is proving to be most popular with older visitors. According to Nielsen, those aged 35 and over make up 58 per cent of eBay UK's traffic. Around 20 per cent of these are judged to be 'heavy users', who visit the site for two hours or more per month.

Interestingly, while women make up around 48 per cent of the UK's online population they accounted for just 43 per cent of the visitors to eBay. So, it seems it is the men who go looking for online bargains - perhaps it is the competitive nature of the auction process that makes it appealing for men. The car and fashion sections were the most popular sections of eBay's site.

Orbit Drop is also in the process of preparing its corporate financial statements through June 2005. Orbit Drop has hired a new CPA who is working around the clock preparing financials that meet both Pink Sheets and SEC requirements. Alan Weinstein, CEO of Orbit Drop, Inc., commented, "We apologize for the delay. While we are experiencing growing pains, we continue to look forward to our Grand Openings in Tennessee, Oregon and California. We are completely committed to our shareholders and franchisees. We are doing positive things to promote the continuing success of Orbit Drop." Mr. Weinstein plans to conduct a shareholder and investor conference call as soon as the financial statements are completed. He will be discussing Orbit Drop's future plans along with the current financial standing of the company.

The franchising division of Orbit Drop, Inc. has been working diligently in developing and establishing relationships with potential prospects. "We have been approved to grant the Orbit Drop retail eBay drop-off franchise opportunity in 48 of the 50 states including the recent approval in the state of New York," said Dain Turner, VP of Franchising. "Questions about the franchise opportunity should be directed to franchise@orbitdrop.com."

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- A Canadian novelist is auctioning off what he calls the "deed" to the White House on eBay where the highest bid reached $15,000 Wednesday.

David Jenneson said he found out there was no deed to the White House -- it may have never existed -- while researching for his latest book, Night of the Realtors.

Jennesen says he filed a "legal" quitclaim to the deed in Canada and now has the only "deed" to the White House in existence.

He claimed the White House has not been able to find a copy of the deed to the property. He says that means the highest bidder for Jenneson`s document will be the legal owner according to Washington law.

The White House hasn`t responded to the auction.

He said the winner will also get a signed copy of his book.

No word on whether he`s researching any other U.S. government property.

About a fifth are considered heavy users, browsing on the online auction site for two hours or more per month.

The site seems to appeal most of all to those 35 and over, the figures showed. They make up 58% of the site's traffic.

The results show that eBay's popularity continues to rise, beating Google in the growth of visitors to the site.

Internet research company Nielsen//NetRatings said that almost 3.1 billion eBay web pages were viewed in July 05 – a 44 per cent increase on the same time last year.

More than 40 per cent of the internet population visited eBay in July 05 – up 33 per cent on the same time last year.

Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings said: “We all know that eBay has been a huge success - but why? For many people eBay represents, more than any other brand, the greatest attributes about the internet – empowering and bringing people with complementary interests together. The potential of the web to provide a virtual marketplace matching individual supply and demand has been realised brilliantly by eBay particularly when you consider that the site is visited each month by almost half of the entire UK internet population.”

The research shows that eBay visitors average one hour 54 minutes on the site and view 280 pages per month.

Heavy eBay users are most likely to be on between 5pm and 6pm, medium users between 8pm and 9pm, and light users between 6pm and 7pm

Burmaster said: “The majority of total time spent on eBay in the UK is accounted for by a minority of users. However, with 43 per cent of people staying for less than 15 minutes per month the most likely visitor is someone having a cursory look through the site.”

HM Revenue and customs is planning a crackdown on Ebay traders who use the site as a primary source of imcome.

Traders on websites, such as Ebay, who have large amounts of feedback are often thought to be gaining their primary income from the activity of selling online. HMRC are about to launch investigations into these traders, to identify who is Ebay tradnig for a living and not paying tax on their earnings.

The campaign follows Ebay's push to encourage potential traders by tipping the top toys for christmas. The site recommended that sellers purchase Xbox 360 consoles, the Star Wars Electronic Lightsaber, The Da Vinci Code board game or the Tamagotchi Connexion, among others that it predicts will be atop most children's Christmas wishlists.

"Sellers on eBay are being encouraged to stock up on top-selling items, such as the latest computerised gadget from Japan, BowLingual, the dog translator, Playstations and iPods, with the suggestion that they can make a substantial profit over the Christmas selling period," said Watt.

"eBay traders who are unregistered with the UK tax authorities, and who have not declared their eBay income, or are in any doubt about whether they should have paid tax in the past should take professional advice immediately, particularly as voluntary disclosure will help to reduce penalties that HMRC are likely to levy."

According to the Mercury News, Cook bought the shares for 39cents each on July 25 and immediately flogged them on the open market for $41.10.

Cook, 52, apparently also receives a $50,000 annual retainer from eBay, to keep him interested in the company.

We wonder why eBay bothers with giving him this cash. According to Thomson Financial, a research firm that provides insider transaction data to the Mercury News, it appears that since 1999 Cook has managed to gain $64.6 million from eBay inside deals in the company stock. When you get paid those sorts of bananas, you tend to be very interested in the company.

Under terms of the deal, Fandango, which sells tickets online and by phone, will also provide movie synopses, reviews and show times. The alliance is expected to open other marketing opportunities for the two companies.

For example, EBay users looking for DVDs of family movies may also be informed of tickets available up to 45 days in advance for the next "Harry Potter" movie. On the other hand, moviegoers searching Fandango for the upcoming "King Kong" movie would get a link to EBay to place bids for Kong-related memorabilia.

Fandango, based in Los Angeles, sells tickets for nearly 70 percent of U.S. theaters, including 4 out of the 5 largest chains. EBay is headquartered in San Jose, Calif.

Christina Ficara - All Headline News Staff Reporter

Los Angeles, CA (AHN) - EBay is offereing fans of HBO's "Sex and the City" a chance to bid on a faux painting of "Charlotte's" private parts, made famous in the sitcom's first season. The painting was part of the fifth episode, the one in which "Charlotte" (played by Kristin Davis) agrees to have her private parts immortalized by a famous artist.

Since its debut, the picture has been in the basement of Heidi Stenzel, 20, a Long Island, N.Y., college student whose dad worked as the show's construction coordinator.

On Thursday, Stenzel put the picture on eBay, item number 7344280026.

According to the NYPost, there's only been one bid — for 99 cents — but 18 people, from as far off as England, are believed to be following the auction.

For all its reputation as the city of tomorrow, a place that will marry capitalism and cool as effortlessly as New York City or London, the city of Shanghai, truth be told, is not a particularly pleasant place during the summer. It's a steambath, and when the occasional typhoon blows through, it will rain for three days nonstop. Many of the streets simply reek as garbage rots in the oppressive heat. Most people, if they have a choice, try to avoid Shanghai this time of year.

Meg Whitman would not be among those people—at least not this summer. If the CEO of eBay, the world's most successful e-commerce company, had to write an essay titled "How I Spent My Summer Vacation,'' it might begin, "I didn't have one. I went to Shanghai instead, trying to figure out the China market, because my company's future may depend on it."

In February, Whitman said that for eBay, "market leadership in China will be a defining characteristic of leadership globally." Lots of big-time CEOs say things like that these days. Few follow it up by summering in Shanghai. The company cast Whitman's stint in China as business as usual. "She goes there quite a bit [but] it's not too extraordinary," says Matt Bannick, president of eBay's international division. "You know, Meg travels a lot." Whitman, in an e-mail interview with Time, says, "China is unique. It is growing rapidly, and it has a tremendous amount of potential, which is why we have made it a priority for the company."

Yet her Shanghai sojourn is not business as usual to anyone who is anyone in the booming e-commerce market in China. That includes the CEO of the local company giving eBay fits there, Jack Ma of Alibaba-Taobao. On Aug. 8, the Alibaba-eBay competition ceased being a David vs. Goliath battle. Ma announced he was selling a 40% stake in his company to Yahoo! for $1 billion.

"We welcome her and the eBay team to China, and with this Yahoo! deal, we decided to give them a nice big welcome gift," Ma says puckishly. The move instantly transformed the pivotal fight for the e-commerce market in China into a high-profile showdown between two of the most successful companies of the Internet age. "The competition [for the China market] will be fierce, no doubt about it," says Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, who has been friends with Ma for years.

Ma says he and Yang started talking seriously about a deal in May. The key to it, Ma says, is that it gives Alibaba a strong position in four growth segments: business to business, consumer sales, online payments and now, with Yahoo!, search. "When we started Taobao, even our own chief technology officer said, 'Jack, you are crazy. Don't forget eBay.' But we passed eBay in China in just two years." Whitman, for her part, could not have been surprised by Yahoo!'s entrance into China. "Given how quickly the Internet and e-commerce market is exploding in China, you would expect to see a number of players staking claims, which is exactly the case," she told Time.

On Aug. 5, a search-engine outfit called Baidu, a.k.a. China's Google, launched an IPO in the U.S. The stock was initially priced at $27—and closed at $122.54 after its first day of trading, a move that evoked nothing if not the infamous dotcom bubble of the 1990s. Except that no one believes China's Internet boom is a bubble, given that there is so much potential growth.

The critical importance of eBay's international growth, and of China's piece of that growth, couldn't be clearer. In just a decade, eBay has gone from America's online flea market—purveyor of old 45s, Happy Days lunch boxes and Pez dispensers—to a global powerhouse, with footprints in no fewer than 32 countries. In fact, in the first quarter of 2005, the number of registered eBay users abroad exceeded that at home. According to John Yunker, president of Byte Level Research, "by 2006, and perhaps even by the last quarter of this year, non-U.S. revenue will surpass U.S. revenue." That's because eBay's revenue growth is slowing in the U.S. as the market matures (last year domestic revenues grew 34% to $1.89 billion) and because its international growth has been extraordinary. eBay's gross-merchandise volume (GMV)—the total dollar value of the deals done on a given website—in Britain, France and Italy all increased 100% or more last year. Consider that in 2000, eBay's international revenue totaled $29 million. By 2004, that figure was $1 billion.

For some time, it was simply a given that eBay would take China by storm as the online marketplace exploded, that it would be, as Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck puts it, a "layup." In 1999, Shao Yibo, a Harvard Business School graduate, started EachNet, an e-commerce company, in China. Shao's site openly aped eBay in style and content, effectively screaming "buy me" at the San Jose, California, giant. In 2002 eBay complied, paying $30 million for a third of the company and taking the rest for an additional $150 million the following year. This, arguably, was a hefty price for a start-up in a market in its infancy, but that was hardly the point. China is on its way to having 200 million Internet users. E-commerce is surging, and dotcom companies in general are back in favor. Wildly so.

But eBay's dominance of the next great e-commerce market has turned out to be anything but a layup. Even before the massive capital infusion from Yahoo!, Alibaba-Taobao was making life unexpectedly difficult for Whitman & Co. Ma, 40, is an English teacher turned Internet pioneer in China, where he started a company that provided basic information about Chinese industrial companies on the Web back in the mid-1990s. In 1999, he launched Alibaba, a business-to-business site that became profitable in 2002 and last year did about $70 million in sales. In 2003, he started Taobao—"searching for treasure" in Mandarin—and he plainly reveled in playing David to Whitman's Goliath. He gleefully tells of being shut out of eBay Live, the company's annual gathering of members of its e-commerce "community,'' because many sellers use Alibaba as a supplier. "We were going to eBay Live to make love, not war, and they canceled us," he says. "Can you believe that?"

Believe it. According to Alexa.com, a market-research site that tracks e-commerce, Taobao has surged in front of eBay by a variety of measurements. As of Aug. 1, Taobao was reaching 15,800 out of every 1 million Internet users, compared with just under 10,000 for eBay China. The number of page views per user—a measure of interest in the site—was 10.7 for Taobao vs. 7.4 for eBay. Most analysts agree that GMV is also a reasonable standard of performance. In the first quarter of this year, Taobao announced $120 million GMV vs. $90 million for eBay. In the second quarter, Taobao claimed $200 million, while eBay withheld its China data, claiming its competitors were distorting the numbers. "We didn't distort anything," says Porter Erisman, Taobao's vice president for corporate marketing. "We just beat them."

For eBay, it's clear the game has only just begun. The company is sinking an additional $100 million into China this year—much of which is going to marketing. eBay ads are ubiquitous on buses in Shanghai and other metro areas, as are its television commercials and online ads as well as other, quirkier promotions. At many popular karaoke bars in Shanghai, for example, customers get an hour of singing and drinking for free if they register as eBay users. The brash Ma mocks these efforts, claiming he canceled his marketing budget in the first half of this year when he discovered how much eBay was spending, figuring that "their ads were just expanding the e-commerce pie for everybody."

That could turn out to be wishful thinking. The same Alexa.com data that put Taobao in front also show a distinct narrowing of the gap. The reach-per-million-users data, for example, have Taobao's users down 6% over the past three months, while eBay's are up 32%—arguably a sign that what Taobao's Erisman sarcastically calls the "shock and awe" marketing campaign is having an effect. Meanwhile, eBay has rolled out its standard support system for big-time sellers in China. Education sessions are available once or twice a month at "eBay University," and what seller Wu Lin, who runs a full-time business selling clothing on the site, calls "excellent customer service" helps maintain customer loyalty. "If I have a question, they answer it," she says. eBay has finally introduced its secure online-payment system—PayPal. Alibaba-Taobao started its version, Alipay, earlier this year—something that has benefited it significantly in all overseas markets. Wu says she has "looked at Taobao, but I see no reason to leave eBay at this point."

Whitman knows Taobao doesn't charge sellers to list items on its site, but that won't be the case next year, as Ma acknowledges. eBay believes that will be a game changer, even if the alliance with Yahoo! makes Taobao's pockets that much deeper. But a link with Yahoo! gives Ma the capital and technology he needs to battle eBay on its terms. "Meg made a big mistake coming here," he says with a smile. "I respect her for doing so, but the chief commander shouldn't be at the front line with the troops. It just causes confusion and panic."

Nice try, Jack. Whitman is in China because she knows the cost of failure could be astronomical. In 1999, technical problems delayed eBay's roll-out in Japan. That allowed Yahoo! to get a jump on the online shopping business in what has become the second largest e-commerce market in the world—a lead it has never relinquished. eBay pulled out of the market entirely in 2002, a move Whitman has rued ever since. She is not about to let the Japan debacle be repeated anywhere else, especially China; nor is it probable that she wants to spend another summer in stifling Shanghai.

An eBay entrepreneur is now hawking a baseball on which he claims the face of Cindy Sheehan has magically appeared.

Interestingly, the image on the ball looks like a sad face that could have been drawn with a typical magic marker.

Click Here!

As if Jennifer Aniston doesn't have enough trouble reports are that the 36-year old knockout now has an underwear stalker, thief and entrepreneur.  The 3 A.M. Girls have a report that runs Saturday in the UK Mirror that reports the beauty has hired a security team to fight off the thong and bra thief.

Jen has hired a "gang of heavies to guard her film-set trailer after a pervert broke in and knicked her knickers, then flogged them on eBay," the report states.

Knickers--ah I love the British.  I'm guessing every red blooded American male is thinking more along the lines of thongs and push ups.  

However, a quick EBay check shows no such items.  So if this report is indeed accurate the items have been pulled.

Continuing from the report:

The sexy star, filming "The Break Up" in Chicago with heartthrob Vince Vaughn, 35, was furious after finding someone had broken in and made off with her bras and pants. But the 36-year-old former Friends star was horrified when her frilly smalls appeared on the internet auction site.

No one wants their intimate apparel auctioned off to the highest bidder, unless it's for charity of course. 

The whole ordeal sounds pretty creepy.

A Schofield Barracks soldier has been convicted of illegally selling five body-armor vests on eBay, an Internet auction site, and one protective body-armor insert via e-mail.

Staff Sgt. Saint Clarence D. Avery, who is assigned to the 25th Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade, was charged in federal district court in Philadelphia for selling body armor between December 2003 and January 2004 for nearly $2,800.

At the time, Avery was a supply sergeant assigned to Charlie Company 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Regiment -- a unit of the 82nd Infantry Division -- at Fort Bragg, N.C.

On eBay, Avery said he was in Philadelphia, although he lived in North Carolina, according to the federal indictment.

The Philadelphia Daily News reported yesterday that U.S. District Judge John Padova spared Avery on Thursday from having to go to prison, which would have meant immediate dismissal from the Army. Instead, Avery was placed on probation. He has two more years left on his enlistment.

There was no immediate word from Schofield Barracks, where Avery is stationed, about whether he faces any additional punishments.

Padova's sentence apparently was based on letters from Avery's past and current commanders who praised his service record.

His current commander, Lt. Col. Robert Mundell, who heads the 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division Light, said, "His service is best characterized as exceptional."

Padova fined Avery $2,000 and said he will be on probation for five years, the newspaper said.

Avery, the father of five, sold the body-armor vests and protective inserts to make extra money at Christmas in 2003 before he deployed to Iraq, the newspaper reported.

The eight-page federal indictment said Avery stole five body vests and a pair of protective inserts, which cannot be sold as surplus equipment, worth $3,300, while working as a supply specialist for Charlie Company.

"The body armor was intended to be issued to soldiers who were being deployed to serve during a time of war in Afghanistan and Iraq," the indictment said.

Ten years after being formed in 1995, eBay has become the world's leading online marketplace for all sorts of goods. At any given time, 29 million items are available worldwide on eBay, with more than 3.5 million new items added every day and $1,000 worth of merchandise sold every second. The online auction site has 135 million registered users in 32 international markets, and more than 430,000 people in the United States alone make a full- or part-time living on eBay.

If you think eBay is just about bobblehead dolls and Pez dispensers, think again. While $2.2 billion worth of goods in collectibles were sold on eBay in 2004, antiques and collectibles ranked only No. 6 among eBay's sales categories. The five highest were: automobiles and auto supplies ($11.1 billion); consumer electronics ($3.5 billion); computers ($3.0 billion); clothes and accessories ($2.9 billion); and books, movies and music ($2.4 billion).

Real people are making big bucks on eBay--and thousands have even reached PowerSeller status by maintaining at least $1,000 per month in sales for three consecutive months. Case in point: Angie Cash, 37, a stay-at-home mom who started selling on eBay nearly six years ago because it was "something I could do and watch the kids at the same time." Today, her Kennesaw, Georgia, company, Cashco1000 Inc., sells thousands of home-decoration and other items each month on eBay and expects to break $500,000 in sales on eBay this year.

Even owners of existing businesses have found success on eBay by using it as an adjunct to their brick-and-mortar operations. Dan Morphy, 33, runs the Adamstown Antique Gallery, a 10,000-square-foot antiques mall in Denver, Pennsylvania. After a few successful eBay auctions, he started offering the antiques vendors who rent space in his gallery the opportunity to sell five items a month on eBay, at no charge other than out-of-pocket expenses. Within two years, Morphy not only had a full gallery of dealers, but was also listing 700 pieces a month and had exceeded $2.5 million in eBay sales.

If you dream of building your own eBay business, it's easier than you think. We've distilled what you need to know into five basic steps.

Step 1: Register Your Business

Since every eBay business is a retail business, you should also register your business with federal, state and local tax authorities and consider forming a corporation or an LLC to protect you against legal liability. (For more legal issues you should know about before you start, go to entrepreneur.com/ebay/legaltips.)

Most eBay sellers are also encouraged to open an account with PayPal, an online payment service owned by eBay that enables buyers to pay you by credit card or by debiting their checking accounts, without you having to obtain merchant card accounts.

Click Here For More...

Registering on Ebay.co.uk is a relatively simple task. An email address, password and user name is virtually all it takes before you can start bidding for objects.

Type what you're looking for into the search engine and place a bid by indicating to the site how much you are willing to pay for any object.

Ebay will automatically bid for you up to your maximum bid. If no-one else outbids you during the time limit shown, you've "won" the object, and will have to pay for it by cheque, Paypal (Ebay's own online transaction system) or postal order.

Take into account postage and packing, then just sit back and wait for the order to arrive before leaving feedback for the seller.

Selling on Ebay takes a little longer. Take a digital photo of your object (few people will buy it without seeing it) and write a listing on the site taking into account how much you want to sell the item for.

The higher the starting price, the more you'll pay - but at least it guarantees you won't be selling that £150 leather jacket for a fiver.

You'll pay a fixed fee for listing the item plus a percentage of the eventual price you sell it for. When someone has won an auction send out the item quickly, and make sure it is as described.

Cam Thompson used to drag himself to swap meets to find parts for his hot rods.

The Rochester Hills man haggled with sellers he most likely would never see again, making every purchase for his precious Camaros a bit of a risk.

Those days are now as old as the vintage vehicles parading on Woodward Avenue since eBay Motors put a global market at the fingertips of car enthusiasts.

"I've had a lot of great finds on eBay," said Thompson, who figures he has bought more than 100 items, mostly car parts. "It's so much easier than going to a swap meet in terms of variety, prices and reliability. The eBay feedback is the best. You get to read everyone's comment about whether they had a good exchange or it was total garbage."

Thompson's favorite find was a suspension kit designed by Herb Adams, the father of the Pontiac Trans Am.

"I paid for $275 for it," Thompson said. "It was easily $2,000 worth of parts you just can't get anywhere else."

Thompson was recounting his electronic auction triumphs Thursday at the eBay booth set up at Memorial Park for Saturday's Woodward Dream Cruise. The 11th annual cruise is the first one for eBay.

"We were hearing so many amazing stores about this event we had to be a part of it," said Drew Lieberman, senior director of eBay Motors. "It's such a great celebration of the enthusiasm related to anything automotive."

And, that's what eBay Motors happens to hawk. A car sells every minute, an engine every 25 seconds and a car part every two seconds. In the second quarter of 2005, sales hit $14.3 billion.

Patti Tiver of Medford, N.J., successfully bid on an orange 1971 Plymouth Roadrunner that she had shipped from the seller in Lakewood, Ohio. She said friends chided her about spending $10,800 for a car sight unseen but she has no regrets.

"There's a lot of trust involved but you can't just open a newspaper and find a car like this," said Tiver, who plans to drive it in the Dream Cruise. "I've had it a year now and haven't had to do one thing to it."

Tiver has been partial to the early 1970s Roadrunners since she was a kid watching the TV show "The Dukes of Hazzard."

"Daisy had a yellow '72,'" she noted. "I like my orange one though. It's the color of the General Lee."

Jim Horton of Jacksonville, Fla., also was at Memorial Park telling stories of how he restored a 1925 Model T Roadster with parts from eBay over the last 2-1/2 years. Online auctions are exciting, he said, with some going down to the last second for really hard-to-find accessories like a 1920s ash wood pickup truck bed.

"A guy in Indiana found one in his grandfather's garage," Horton said. "I was an early bidder, but then some Model T clubs found out and there was a huge bidding war."

Horton won it for $2,000.

"It's one of only six known to exist," he said.

The wooden pickup bed helped complete Horton's restoration project, giving him a lot of bragging rights amongst the Model T crowd.

"1925 was a pinnacle year," he said. "It was the first year with the electric starter, the first year for the pickup truck and the first year for wire spoke wheels. I've got all the whistles and bells now."

Horton will keep his prized vehicle parked on the sidelines Saturday, however.

"It goes 45 mph. I don't know if this crowd will be fast enough," he joked.

In addition to happy car owners, eBay Motors will have a lounge made of car parts for spectators on Saturday and displays including a Harley Davidson motorcycle auctioned by Jay Leno for tsunami relief.

Rosie Murray-West is hooked on the auction site - just like millions of other online shoppers

I'd like to say a great big hello to my postman and my broadband internet connection, without which this article wouldn't have been possible. I am celebrating my proudest moment in the last few months - the award of a gold feedback star from internet auction site Ebay.

If that means nothing to you, I'll explain. It means I'm a good girl. I always pay on time and leave nice comments for people when they send me stuff. It also means that I've been spending far too much money on clothes that arrive, mysteriously, through the post from people I've never even heard of. So I'd also like to say a big sorry to my credit card and my husband - although everything I've been buying has been a bargain, honest.

Perhaps I should start "Ebayaholics Anonymous", since I'm certainly not alone. The auction site launched in the UK six years ago, and we now spend more time on it than any other internet site. This week the world of economists, not usually associated with frivolous online shopping, finally sat up and took notice of the brave new world that is changing how we buy and sell.

The Centre for Economic and Business Research, produced a rather dry report suggesting that our ability to sell unwanted possessions online via Ebay has increased the value of the average household's assets by £3,000. The same report estimates that more than £4billion of trading will take place over Ebay this year - a figure which represents 1.3pc of total retail sales in the UK.

With high street sales struggling, it's easy to see where some of Britain's shoppers are going. Even my postman has noticed. "You've been on that Ebay, haven't you?" he said when I shamefacedly picked up five parcels from him last week. "It's always the women."

Azita Qadri, Ebay's small business manager who also used to be in charge of clothing, says that it's impossible to estimate the effect Ebay is having on traditional retailersbut she believes most people are using it as a complementary part of the shopping experience, rather than making it their only way of buying clothes.

"There are an amazing variety of reasons why people do it," she says. "People do it if they know their size and the brand they want and don't want to go trawling up and down the high street," she says.

Richard Hyman, of retail research group Verdict, says that Ebay is having an effect on the retail market but it's still early days. "We have been living in a disposable culture for a long time now, almost by default rather than by design, because it was too difficult to go to things like car boot sales or we weren't in the vicinity of them," he says. "Ebay makes all of that easy."

He adds that some areas of the retail market are likely to be more affected than others. "Clothes shopping for women is a very tactile experience," he says. "The retailer really gets a chance to entice you in. It's very difficult to do that on a screen." However, he draws a distinction between shopping and buying. "Shopping is an experience, but you don't always buy anything."

Ms Qadri, at Ebay, though, believes that the site can have an edge over traditional shopping. "Customers love it because they don't have to deal with any smarmy sales people."

She's acutely attuned to the psychology of the chase. "People enjoy the excitement of an auction, and the fun of getting packages through the post."

One of the site's cleverest pieces of marketing has to be its use of semantics. You don't "buy" an item in an Ebay auction, you "win" it. For someone who hasn't won anything since the school tombola in the mid 1980s, that's a powerful incentive in itself.

By "winning" a few items of clothing (OK, more than a few) I am just touching the tip of the Ebay iceberg. The site, which was originally launched as a sort of giant geek convention for stamp and coin collections, has created a whole new world of its own.

The members of Ebay could create a nation state more sizeable than Germany, and probably with less of a debt problem. Its market capitalisation, on the New York Stock Exchange, is $54billion, and Ebay estimates that 724,000 people in the US alone earn at least part of their income from the site.

Ms Qadri says there is no such information for the UK, but anecdotal information suggests the numbers are high, and the rewards can be too. Gemma Smart, 28, set up a plus-sized fashion business over Ebay last year, after testing the water by offering a few large-sized items of clothing. "They went so quickly," she recalls. "I only sell over Ebay, because I've been so busy I haven't been able to set up my own website."

Ms Smart left her job as a fashion buyer to set up on her own. "People said I was a complete idiot," she says. "I had a good job and a company car." She claims she is now earning "between four and five times as much" as she was before.

"I don't have a life though," she adds. "I spend all my time online." Ms Smart also buys everything she needs for her business from Ebay, including packaging. "I've had a few disappointments," she admits, "but ultimately Ebay is very safe."

The feedback system, set up by Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, is what keeps the buyer as safe as possible. Buyers and sellers are encouraged to leave feedback when they deal with an item, and those who don't deliver as promised are therefore penalised accordingly. While buyers are free to deal with any seller they like, few buy something without checking the feedback score, helping to freeze out bad sellers.

Some sellers, too, won't deal with anyone who doesn't have a perfect feedback score - hence my delight over my gold star (for ten pieces of positive feedback), which means I can "win" even more than I have before.

It's not foolproof, of course, and the site has suffered plenty of bad publicity as people have tried to sell Nazi memorabilia, pornography, fake designer goods and Live 8 Tickets. Ebay also receives criticism for the size of its fees - a percentage of the selling price plus a fixed rate. It recently announced a large increase in US seller's fees, and missed profit forecasts in January - resulting in a decline in share price.

In the UK, though, Ebay is going strong and as well as those who make their living buying and selling on it, there are plenty of entrepreneurs on the periphery who are cashing in too, including the software engineers who will sell you computer programmes that will bid on Ebay for you five seconds before the auction closes. This process, called "sniping", is frowned upon by many Ebay buyers and sellers, although it is totally legal.

Royal Mail, too, is cashing in. As well as the obvious increase in the number of parcels it carries, it has also managed to set up a joint venture solution for big businesses who want to sell end-of-range products via the site. Many businesses that use it, understandably, want to remain anonymous, but Vodafone is one customer.

Auctioning4u, which won an extra £500,000 of funding from investor Jeremy Metcalfe last week, relies on our laziness. It owns real shops where you can drop off your goods for them to photograph, put on Ebay and sell for you. For this service it takes a hefty one third of the sale price, but people are rushing in. For some of them, the alternative is the charity shop.

These shops have seen a marked drop in the quality of goods being given away since the arrival of Ebay. They're just about to get a windfall from me, though. I've bought so many clothes that my husband says something has to go - including the two Ebay disasters I purchased last week. In my defence, I only paid £4.50. That's the beauty of Ebay - my mistakes are cheap.

Now's your chance to die in a Stephen King novel or be portrayed "in a good light" in the next thriller from John Grisham -- while championing the cause of free speech.

That's the idea behind a charity auction on eBay that starts Sept. 1 and features 16 authors selling character names to the highest bidders. All proceeds go to the First Amendment Project, a nonprofit legal group dedicated to free speech.

In addition to King and Grisham, writers agreeing to sell a name in their upcoming books include Amy Tan, Peter Straub, Nora Roberts, Lemony Snicket and Dave Eggers. All have penned summaries of what they plan to offer in an auction preview at ebay.com/fap.

Not all are selling characters. Neil Gaiman has offered to include "your name, or the name of someone you love" on a gravestone in his upcoming novel. Snicket, a popular children's writer, is offering "an utterance" by a certain character, but concedes the spelling may be "mutilated."

The most priceless preview comes from horrormeister King, who writes that he will want his buyer to provide a physical description and nickname and that "a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female." The winning bidder will appear in King's book "Cell" next year or in 2007.

In all cases, anyone named must grant their permission, says David Greene, executive director of the First Amendment Project.

With 128 shopping days to Christmas, Ebay is hoping to encourage trade on its site by highlighting how its sellers can profit from the retail sector’s busiest time of year by planning ahead.

The firm said that last September, Playstation 2 consoles were being sold on eBay for as little as £99. However, at Christmas, when high street shop shelves were bare, PS2’s on eBay rocketed in price to £249, representing a 250% profit.

Robosapien also featured on people's must have lists for 2004. Examples were selling for over £100 on eBay in December despite being only £70 in the shops two months previously

Charlie Coney, eBay spokesperson, said: "There are lots of exciting present ideas already in the shops and they will soon start to appear on both eBay and Dear Santa lists. Nobody knows what will be the Christmas no. 1 best seller but you can have a pretty good guess.

"Lots of eBayers cashed in at Christmas last year whilst at the same time offering last minute present buyers the chance to purchase the must-have present for their loved one

1. V2 Robosapien

2. Xbox 360

3. PlayStation Pocket - PSP

4. Furby

5. Amazing Amanda

6. Star Wars Electronic Lightsaber

7. Tamagotchi Connexion

8. Rock Angels Bratz

9. Monopoly 70th Anniversary Here & Now Limited Edition

10. The Da Vinci Code (board game by UK Winning Moves)

Pugster is best known for its slider charms for Italian charm bracelets. They also offer glitzy rhinestone brooches, fashion watches, and even body jewelry. Pugster's products are trendy and affordable, making them fun purchases for many fashion jewelry lovers.

To celebrate their eBay accomplishment, Pugster offered numerous prize give-aways with a total value exceeding $10,000. The grand prize was granted to the eBay buyer who left the 1 millionth positive feedback for Pugster: a 4-night, 5-day trip to Maui, including accommodations for two at the Ritz-Carlton and airfare. Not a bad reward for purchasing jewelry priced as low as $0.99.

For the next 50 positive-feedback-leavers after the 1 million mark, Pugster awarded valuable gift certificates from popular retailers like Pottery Barn, Bloomingdales, Dell, and Sharper Image.

While this is a pretty neat way for Pugster to reward its customers, the word is still out on whether eBay will consider these awards a violation of its user policy prohibiting "feedback solicitation." According to eBay's rules, "offering to sell, buy or trade feedback is not permitted." Offering free gifts to customers only if they leave positive feedback does seem a little edgy. But regardless of how the prize giveaway fits - or doesn't - with eBay rules, Pugster's winning eBay customers probably had no complaint!

The eBay Day Small Business Tour will roll into Denver Aug. 24 through 26. The event will be held at gate 2 of the Denver Mail Processing/Distribution Center at 7500 E. 3rd Place in Denver.

eBay experts will present information on how to use eBay to create or grow a business. Folks from the USPS will offer clinics on how to package, label and insure packages.

More than 12,500 Denver-area residents earn either a primary or secondary income selling on eBay, according to recent national survey by ACNielsen International Research.

Attendees can sign up for workshops or register for a full-day eBay University course. All sessions are free. Interested eBay-ers can pre-register at usps.com/ebayday/.

This isn't the way eBay's (Nasdaq: EBAY) reign ends in China, folks.

Earlier this month, when Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) announced that it was making a $1 billion investment to obtain a 40% stake in Chinese auctioneer Alibaba.com, even some of the most ardent eBay bulls probably got nervous. It wasn't so long ago that Yahoo! had hooked up with Softbank to squash eBay in Japan.

It's not going to play out quite that way this time.

For starters, what is Yahoo! Auctions stateside? I can tell you what Yahoo! Auctions is not. There are not a countless number of e-books out there to educate a consumer on how to get rich by selling on Yahoo! Auctions. There isn't a "Yahoo! Auctions Live" conference in California every summer. There aren't growing chains of consignment shops that thrive on moving product through Yahoo! Auctions.

No. That's all eBay. Like every other virtual marketplace wannabe, Yahoo! has never posed much of a threat to eBay in the United States. Yahoo! was in the perfect position to become a legitimate threat. It's a popular online destination. It keeps a massive mailing list thanks to its lively email service. It keeps merchants close through e-commerce solutions. Those inherent advantages didn't help. Yahoo! tried to win over the public on price, but that didn't work either. That's why, two months ago, Yahoo! decided to make its auction site completely free.

With that move, I can offer you the chance to take a virtual trip through Yahoo! Auctions and come to the literal and logical cobweb-ridden conclusion that Yahoo! Auctions can't even give itself away.

Chinese checkers
The perceived danger to eBay in China isn't coming so much from Yahoo! as it is from Alibaba. More specifically, it is Alibaba's TaoBao.com consumer-to-consumer auction site that has some observers worried.

As a free site, TaoBao suffers from many of the same shortcomings that Yahoo! Auctions does domestically. Because it costs nothing to list an item, it's a haven for spam and unrealistic starting bid prices, just as eBay's own American site becomes a clutter of noise when it rolls out the occasional free-listing day. That just proves that the quality of traffic is just as important as the quantity.

True, eBay became the gold standard because of volume. Bidders came because it's where the sellers were, and sellers came because it's where bidders were. However, the secret ingredient in that recipe was that because of the escalating listing fees, every bidder had a vested interest in pricing the auction with the intent to sell.

This is not to say that TaoBao is a sham. In fact, if its claims are accurate -- and the company was able to connect consumer transactions that totaled $200 million this past quarter -- TaoBao is doing just fine.

Earlier this year, TaoBao's grasp on the market was at 41% to eBay's 53%. They are both strong. History dictates that just one consumer auction site will reign supreme in any given country, but history can be a schmuck sometimes. China's Internet boom is in its infancy, with 1.2 billion of the country's 1.3 billion residents still not connected. Why can't there be two dominant players in a country that is many times larger than most nations?

Big in Japan
One of the grandest misconceptions out there is that eBay failed in Japan. A more accurate description would be that eBay never had a chance to get started. Yahoo! had teamed up with Softbank in 1999 to launch its auction site well before eBay had even stepped foot on the rich country's soil. When eBay gingerly tried to enter the market, it got nothing but jet lag. It was toast.

That's not the case in China. TaoBao wasn't even around when eBay had acquired its first stake in EachNet three years ago and swallowed it whole in 2003. This isn't eBay's battle to win. It's eBay's battle to lose.

If TaoBao succeeds, it won't be because it toppled eBay. It will be because it found a way to coexist. The pressure now rests on TaoBao and the strategy it takes in the future. The company has mentioned that it may start charging for auctions as early as next year, but I'm not entirely convinced that it will happen.

It's too risky. If the company's auction volume plummets once it starts charging its sellers, TaoBao may never recover. Site changes and a poorly received escrow service have caused eBay to stumble in China in the past. It has recovered. TaoBao won't be as fortunate. If it fails to deliver a workable platform as a pay site next year, the retreat will be more than just humiliating. It will be exposed as a flawed model. Investors will lose interest, and auctioneers may just follow suit. That's why I see TaoBao holding its ground as a free site and using its presence as a way to grow its Alipay clone of PayPal as well as earning its keep through advertising.

China is too important a market to lose for the sake of attempted one-upmanship.

The 1-ton coup behind the Meg Drop soup
Just look at some of the key players beyond the auction space. China's leader in online gaming is Shanda Interactive (Nasdaq: SNDA). Its Internet games are wildly popular, with as many as 2.5 million Chinese gamers playing at any one time. You have NetEase (Nasdaq: NTES) right behind Shanda. Both companies are growing earnings on fat double-digit profit margins. You have Sina (Nasdaq: SINA) in the portal space and Baidu.com (Nasdaq: BIDU) as the search engine of choice. These are all amazing companies, pumping out some jaw-dropping income statements. And the beauty here is that we're talking about a region where the per capita annual income is a mere $1.200. Just 8% of the residents are Web-enabled. What will happen as the country's economy improves to the point where disposable income grows along with Internet usage?

That's why our Motley Fool Rule Breakers newsletter service, a premium research product that specializes in ultimate growth stocks, has already singled out Shanda and NetEase as recommendations. One is up by better than 50% since we picked it nine months ago.

China's potential is huge. It's why eBay can't afford to lose. And it's why TaoBao can't afford to try to see if it can win. They will remain two visible enemies, talking a big game in public but -- privately -- laughing their way to the bank.

A Toledo woman has been paid more than $1,700 to sell what she says is the image of Jesus - on a pierogi.

Donna Lee, a resident of the city's Point Place neighborhood, said she noticed the image while preparing her family's Easter dinner earlier this year.

And now an Internet casino known for its collection of odd artifacts, GoldenPalace.com, has paid her $1,775 for the pierogi, with a crust that some say looks like an image of Jesus. The company plans to include it as part of a traveling exhibit of unusual items it has acquired.

"It all happened right here," a visibly excited Mrs. Lee said yesterday, pointing to her kitchen cooking range. "I was frying my pierogies in the pan and then when I turned them over, I saw the face of Jesus."

Mrs. Lee, a devout Catholic and a clerk at St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center, said she put the special pierogi in a plastic bag and stored it in her freezer. She said her relatives gave her a hard time, making fun of her over the pierogi and for reminding them of her mother who died two years ago.

"Just before she passed, my mother always said that she saw Jesus and the blessed Virgin Mary everywhere," Mrs. Lee recalled. She said she plans on donating a portion of the money from the pierogi's sale to the Hospice of Northwest Ohio, where her mother lived for the last years of her life.

Mrs. Lee said she and her husband, Thomas, - who celebrate Easter with their family with a dinner of pierogies, kielbasa, and ham - gave no thought to the Jesus likeness sitting in their fridge until last week.

That's when Mrs. Lee was convinced by her sister and brother-in-law in Michigan to put the special pierogi up for sale online on eBay, the Internet auction house.

Mrs. Lee pulled the frozen pierogi out of her freezer yesterday as she gave details of the sale to friends and family members who called.

"Did you hear about my story? It was my pierogi with Jesus. I sold him," she told a friend who called to inquire.

Ever since she put the pierogi up for sale, Mrs. Lee's answering machine has been inundated with phone calls from reporters from Australia, Canada, Taiwan, Texas, and Wisconsin. There were more than 44,000 Web hits for the pierogi on eBay before the sale ended Monday, she said proudly.

The Internet casino GoldenPalace.com was the highest bidder. The Antigua-based company recently started a collection of odd items and aggressively pursued the pierogi with the Jesus likeness.

"It's certainly in line with what we have purchased in the past," said Richard Allen, the firm's director of marketing and public relations. "These kinds of things have become a part of popular culture. This pierogi has a true likeness and, of course, people pay attention when we do stuff like this."

Mr. Allen said the casino company plans to take the unusual items on a tour of different American cities.

He said there is a market for people who want to see the items, which include a 10-year-old partially eaten cheese sandwich which purportedly bears Virgin Mary's image, a pretzel shaped like the Virgin Mary holding a baby Jesus, and a pregnancy test that allegedly belonged to Britney Spears.

It will be like a "museum on wheels," he said.

It can take years of late-night navel gazing for a novelist to name a character, or it could come as quickly as an Internet auction on eBay.

Next month, Stephen King, Amy Tan, Lemony Snicket, Nora Roberts, Michael Chabon and 11 other best-selling writers will auction the right to name characters in their new novels. The profits will go to the First Amendment Project, whose lawyers have repeatedly gone to court to protect the free-speech rights of activists, writers and artists.

"It feels a little scary for most writers because when you're writing, you're completely in charge — you can say this book is all mine, it's my world," said Chabon. "Whether giving over some of that has any monetary value or not, we'll see."

But bidders beware — most of the authors are clearly retaining creative control to use the names as they see fit.

King says the highest bidder will get to name a character in a new zombie novel he describes as being "like cheap whiskey — very nasty and extremely satisfying."

Cult comic author Neil Gaiman will let his top buyer select the name for a gravestone. Andrew Sean Greer promises the winner may choose the name of a "coffee shop, bar, corset company or other business in another scene," but only "should it suit the author."

John Grisham is one of only a handful promising to portray the top bidder's chosen name "in a good light."

On Sept. 1, eBay Giving Works, the site's dedicated program for charity listings, will go live with the electronic auction. For the next 25 days, anyone with an Internet connection can bid 24 hours a day to insert names into their favorite writers' heads. The event's organizers say they believe it will fetch well over the nonprofit First Amendment Project's goal of $50,000.

Other writers include Dave Eggers, Dorothy Allison, Peter Straub, ZZ Packer, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, Ayelet Waldman, Andrew Sean Greer and Karen Joy Fowler.

David Greene, executive director of the First Amendment Project, which was founded in 1994, said that money raised by the auction will go to support the organization's pro bono work representing clients being sued over free speech, free press and freedom of expression. One such case, over whether a high school student's angry poetry constituted a "criminal threat," recently went before the California Supreme Court.

Snicket, who will let the top bidder determine an utterance by Sunny Baudelaire in his upcoming 13th installment of his Series of Unfortunate Events, said he holds the First Amendment dear because "the only trouble I should get in for my writing is the trouble I make myself."

His only caveat: The meaning of the utterance may be slightly "mutilated."

Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) -- It started with walks along China's Great Wall and culminated at California's Pebble Beach resort, where Yahoo Inc.! cofounder Jerry Yang decided to make a $1 billion bet on Alibaba.com Chief Executive Officer Jack Ma.

The friendship the two formed on their Wall hikes led to Yahoo's purchase of 40 percent of Ma's privately held Alibaba, China's biggest electronic-commerce company and No. 2 online auctioneer. Now the question is whether the goodwill that spurred the acquisition will help Yahoo overtake EBay Inc., China's leading online auctioneer, and win more search-engine customers in the second-biggest Internet market after the U.S.

``The Alibaba purchase gives Yahoo a strong local entrepreneur, a heavyweight in the industry, who can drive the company to success,'' says Duncan Clark, managing director of Beijing-based technology consultant BDA China Ltd. ``China is a high-maintenance market. It is highly regulated, highly sensitive and difficult to manage from 15 hours' time difference away.''

Yahoo controls just 3 percent of China's online auction market and ranks second among search engines. To turn the company from a laggard into a leader, Ma, 40, faces the challenges of winning the loyalty of Yahoo's 600 China-based employees and attracting customers in a relatively undeveloped electronic- commerce market.

``Chinese Internet users tend to focus on online games and spend a lot less on e-commerce,'' says Frank Shi, an analyst at CLSA Ltd. in Hong Kong. ``The Chinese market is still immature, and there is a lot of potential.''

Risks

Ma also has to ensure that Yahoo employees in China don't defect, says Victor Gao, CEO of China State-Owned Enterprise Investment Co., a Beijing-based merger consultant.

``There is a risk that the staff at Yahoo China may not want to follow Ma,'' Gao says. ``He needs to move quickly to win them over.''

Zhou Hongyi, Yahoo China's current president, said in an Aug. 8 interview that he didn't think the Alibaba transaction made sense. Zhou, 35, said last week that he would resign at the end of the month to join IDG Venture Capital.

``Alibaba has its own business-to-business and consumer-to- consumer revenue models, while Yahoo is strong in search engines and e-mails,'' says Zhou, who sold 3721 Network Software Co., the operator of a Chinese search engine, to Yahoo in 2003. ``The revenue models don't match.''

Shares of Yahoo rose 0.5 percent to $34.39 yesterday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The stock has slid 8.7 percent this year, compared with a 1.4 percent drop in the Nasdaq Composite Index.

$1 Billion Deal

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo agreed on Aug. 11 to swap $1 billion in cash and its local unit for 40 percent of Hangzhou- based Alibaba. In addition to its auction site, Taobao.com, Alibaba runs an online trading service with more than 6 million business subscribers in China, according to the company.

Yahoo, which runs the world's most-visited Web portal, is expanding in China to tap a market where the number of Web users has grown sevenfold in eight years to 94 million. China's online auction market will expand sixfold to $2.6 billion by 2007, Beijing-based market researcher iResearch Inc. forecasts.

Yang, 36, is turning Yahoo China over to a local partner after the company failed to raise its share of the nation's Internet auction market above the 3 percent iResearch estimates it has.

Yahoo began competing in that market last year, investing an undisclosed amount to form online auctioneer 1pai.com through a venture with Sina Corp., which operates China's most popular Internet portal.

Bigger Than EBay

Together, Alibaba and Yahoo will knock San Jose, California- based EBay from the No. 1 spot. EBay's EachNet site controlled 39 percent of China's consumer online auction market at the end of 2004, and Alibaba's Taobao.com had 37 percent, iResearch says. EachNet charges a fee, while Taobao.com and 1pai.com are free.

Yahoo doesn't routinely disclose its Chinese unit's market share. EBay had been detailing sales in the country until the recent quarter.

Alibaba also releases scant information on its financial performance. The company said in a press release earlier this year that it had sales of $46 million in 2004, mostly from online advertising. It didn't provide a year-earlier figure.

Laurence Brahm, a lawyer and the chairman of Beijing-based investment company Naga Group, says Chinese companies often aren't accountable to shareholders.

``Corporations are run like personal bank accounts in China,'' says Brahm, who helps multinationals set up in China. ``There is no accountability.'' Government censorship makes the Internet market especially risky for overseas investors, Brahm says.

`Google Is History'

Yahoo entered China when it bought Zhou's Hong Kong-based 3721 Network Software for about $120 million in November 2003, gaining control of what's now China's No. 2 Internet search engine.

3721, China's biggest search engine when Yahoo bought it, had a 32 percent market share as of March 31, according to iResearch. Market leader Baidu.com Inc. had a 37 percent share, and No. 3 Google -- which bought a 2.6 percent stake in Baidu.com last year -- had 19 percent. Alibaba doesn't operate a search engine for consumers.

Ma says he plans to spend some of the proceeds from Yahoo's investment to strengthen the search-engine unit.

``We're going after Baidu.com for the No. 1 spot in China,'' Ma said at the Aug. 11 Beijing press conference announcing the Alibaba deal. ``Google is history as far as I'm concerned.''

Alibaba's trading site -- which lets small- and medium-sized companies exchange and export goods -- has more than 15 million subscribers worldwide, according to the company.

`Digging for Treasure'

Alibaba.com is the nation's No. 1 business-to-business site, according to Analysys International, a Beijing-based technology consulting firm. Yahoo China doesn't have a site that lets companies trade with each other.

Alibaba also runs an online payment site, alipay.com, that allows companies to complete transactions on line -- also a service Yahoo lacks in China. Alibaba.com and Taobao, which means ``digging for treasure'' in Chinese, will keep their existing names, according to Yang.

Combining with Alibaba gives Yahoo millions of new customers for its e-mail and search services, says Analysys CEO Edward Yu.

``Yahoo's search engines, combined with Alibaba's more than 6 million Chinese online businesses, provide Yahoo with a powerful combination,'' Yu says. ``Ma and his executives are a strong team.''

Pebble Beach

A native of Hangzhou in southeastern Zhejiang province, Ma studied English at Hangzhou Teachers' Institute, graduating in 1988, according to Porter Erisman, Alibaba's vice president of marketing in Shanghai. To improve his English, Ma gave foreigners free tours of Hangzhou. The city is known for its West Lake, which produces the hairy crabs that are a Chinese delicacy.

The Yahoo-Alibaba deal, negotiated over the past three months by Ma and Yang, was hatched in early May during the U.S.- China IT Executive Summit in Pebble Beach, Erisman says.

Ma says he became friends with Yang in 1998, four years after Yahoo's founding. Yang, who was born in Taiwan and grew up in San Jose, was visiting China to explore his cultural homeland and the country's Internet market, Erisman says.

At the time, Ma's first project -- Hangzhou Hope Networks Consulting, an online directory of Chinese businesses that he founded in 1995 -- had just been shut in a government crackdown on Internet sites.

`Combining Forces'

Ma founded Alibaba in 1999 with $25 million from venture capitalists, according to Alibaba's Web site. Current shareholders include Fidelity Capital, a unit of Boston-based Fidelity Investments; Granite Global Ventures, based in Menlo Park, California; and Singapore-based Venture TDF Pte and Transpac Capital Ltd., according to the Web site.

``We used to take these great hikes on the Great Wall,'' Ma says. ``From our hikes, we developed a friendship that ended up with us combining forces in forming this new Chinese company.'' A photo of the two together on the Great Wall was displayed at the press conference announcing the deal.

The final agreement was signed at the offices of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, Yahoo's law firm, in Palo Alto, California, at 11:20 p.m. local time on Aug. 10, just after the press release was issued, Alibaba Chief Financial Officer Joseph Tsai says. Yang and Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, 62, celebrated with him over champagne, Tsai says.

At the same, Ma and Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Daniel Rosensweig were in Beijing announcing the deal. Yahoo expects the transaction to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2005.

Softbank Stake

Ma will be the chief executive officer of the combined company and sit on the board of directors with Yang, Softbank Corp. President Masayoshi Son -- an original Yahoo shareholder -- and Tsai, the companies say. Unlike Yahoo China's Zhou, who ultimately reported to Semel, Ma will be accountable only to the Alibaba board, Rosensweig says.

Ma is the man to take Yahoo forward in China, says Son, whose Tokyo-based Softbank is Japan's No. 2 provider of high- speed Internet access. Son is also chairman of Yahoo! Japan Corp., which is 42 percent owned by Softbank.

``There were many companies that wanted to talk to us when we first started doing business in China,'' Son says. ``Jack Ma was the only one I spoke to, or wanted to speak to, directly.''

Softbank is selling part of its 40 percent stake in Taobao to Yahoo for $360 million, the Japanese company said Aug. 11. It will have a 27 percent stake in the merged company.

``Jack, Jerry and I had been talking about the merger for a while,'' says Son, adding that he also considers Ma a friend. ``Jerry and I would like to leave the operation up to Jack. We trust his skills.''

Stephen King and John Grisham are among the authors giving readers a chance to have a character in their forthcoming books named after them.

Horror novelist King is selling off a name in novel Cell - which must be female if it is to be killed off.

Lemony Snicket is offering an utterance by infant character Sunny Baudelaire for the September auction.

Money raised by the Ebay sale will be donated to freedom of expression group the First Amendment Project.

It can take years of late-night navel gazing for a novelist to name a character, or it could come as quickly as an Internet auction on eBay.

Next month, Stephen King, Amy Tan, Lemony Snicket, Nora Roberts, Michael Chabon and 11 other best-selling writers will auction the right to name characters in their new novels. The profits will go to the First Amendment Project, whose lawyers have repeatedly gone to court to protect the free-speech rights of activists, writers and artists.

"It feels a little scary for most writers because when you're writing, you're completely in charge — you can say this book is all mine, it's my world," said Chabon. "Whether giving over some of that has any monetary value or not, we'll see."

But bidders beware — most of the authors are clearly retaining creative control to use the names as they see fit.

King says the highest bidder will get to name a character in a new zombie novel he describes as being "like cheap whiskey — very nasty and extremely satisfying."

Cult comic author Neil Gaiman will let his top buyer select the name for a gravestone. Andrew Sean Greer promises the winner may choose the name of a "coffee shop, bar, corset company or other business in another scene," but only "should it suit the author."

John Grisham is one of only a handful promising to portray the top bidder's chosen name "in a good light."

On Sept. 1, eBay Giving Works, the site's dedicated program for charity listings, will go live with the electronic auction. For the next 25 days, anyone with an Internet connection can bid 24 hours a day to insert names into their favorite writers' heads. The event's organizers say they believe it will fetch well over the nonprofit First Amendment Project's goal of $50,000.

Other writers include Dave Eggers, Dorothy Allison, Peter Straub, ZZ Packer, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, Ayelet Waldman, Andrew Sean Greer and Karen Joy Fowler.

David Greene, executive director of the First Amendment Project, which was founded in 1994, said that money raised by the auction will go to support the organization's pro bono work representing clients being sued over free speech, free press and freedom of expression. One such case, over whether a high school student's angry poetry constituted a "criminal threat," recently went before the California Supreme Court.

Snicket, who will let the top bidder determine an utterance by Sunny Baudelaire in his upcoming 13th installment of his Series of Unfortunate Events, said he holds the First Amendment dear because "the only trouble I should get in for my writing is the trouble I make myself."

His only caveat: The meaning of the utterance may be slightly "mutilated."

The latest in a line of eccentric advertising and charity fundraising stunts, is Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's old bloody bandage. GoldenPalace.com CEO Richard Rowe commented: “Although the authentic head bandage worn by Ariel Sharon has political significance, the goal of our collection of religious, historical and other unusual items is to make headlines worldwide as we want to capitalise on this unique way to get exposure”.

The bandage was reportedly sold by the son of an army medic who changed Sharon’s bandage after fighting Egyptian troops at the Suez Canal in 1973. The blood-soaked ‘souvenir’ has since sparked a number of replica auctions on eBay, including an authentic head bandage from the same war in mint condition and on sale for US$199.

Decades' worth of trinkets clogged John Friebel's San Antonio home.

He thought, "I'm retired. I've got nothing else to do. I'll sell this stuff."

Scores of retirees across the country are finding extra cash and a pastime in a seemingly unlikely arena: eBay. The 10-year-old online auction site and marketplace is attracting older Americans with houses full of collectibles, gifts generated through their own hobbies and skills transferred from their working lives.

"A lot of people are surprised" by retirees setting up shop on eBay, as the Internet is still often considered a younger domain, said Mark Carpenter, general manager of Web strategy and operations for AARP, the Washington-based interest group for Americans 50 and over. "But I don't think it's that odd."

In June, 21 percent of eBay visitors were 55 and older, behind the 35- to 49-year-olds who made up the highest share at 36 percent, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a global Internet media and market research firm with U.S. headquarters in New York.

Hani Durzy, spokesman for eBay, said older adults may be attracted by what brings in folks of all ages: "If you're going to start a business, whether your 18 or 80, eBay is a pretty efficient way to do it." No staff to pay. No store space to rent.

Friebel, 65, worked a combined 40 years for firms that served the Coca-Cola Co., including a business of his own. By the time he retired in 2003, he had amassed 80 boxes of Coca-Cola signs, toy trucks, bottle openers and other memorabilia. Meanwhile, his wife's collection of Department 56 miniature porcelain babies and ceramic villages had become equally mammoth.

"The kids don't want the things that we like," Friebel said. He had considered eBay, but, he admitted, "I'm not computer literate."

With help from his son-in-law, Friebel began selling on eBay in October.

According to research from AARP's Older Wiser Wired project, older parents tend to turn to their adult children with questions about computers and the Internet. Websites with broad age appeal, such as shopping and travel sites, can confuse adults unfamiliar with Internet shorthand, the project reports.

More comfortable

In a survey this year, one-third of adults age 65 and older said they use the Internet. Of those users, 12 percent said they use online auction sites. The survey, by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington, found that 18- to 29-year-old Internet users have more than twice that level of participation in Web auctions -- 27 percent.

"The younger folks are sort of more risk-takers than older folks," said Pew project director Lee Rainie. But, he added, older adults are becoming more comfortable banking, buying and selling online.

Joyce Banbury, 70, is among the coziest.

The retiree from Russell, Kan. -- "Bob Dole's hometown," she heartily proclaims -- started bidding on eBay in 1996. Even though she never managed to place a winning bid, in part because of her agonizingly slow Internet connection, she decided to begin selling in 1998.

"When I got into it at that time, I was very familiar with trade shows; I was very familiar with retailing," Banbury said.

That's because she had run her own business, Wheatcraft Industries, offering nativity sets, dolls and other items woven from wheat. She sold the company in 1990, when she took on raising her granddaughter.

She started small on eBay, with Beanie Babies, the little beanbag animals so hot in the '90s. She upgraded to higher-end wares, including Hummel figurines, vintage pottery and antique silver she acquired while combing estate sales, flea markets and in-person auctions.

California-based eBay isn't the only online auction site on the block. Internet kingpins Yahoo and Amazon.com, for example, introduced auctions in the late 1990s. But competitors have yet to match eBay's traffic, even as some eBay sellers have been put off by fee increases.

Banbury remains loyal. Last month, she traveled to San Jose for eBay Live!, a conference that drew thousands from around the globe. Coming from a rural, isolated community, she said she was thrilled to chat with other retirees.

"When you're retired, and you have a fixed income, even eight or nine or $10,000 a year can mean a lot to you," Banbury said, "the difference between whether you get to do things and whether you have to scrimp."

Trading passions

But selling online isn't just about subsistence. To some retirees, it's a means of trading old passions for new.

Stephen Mellenthin, 60, of Huber Heights, Ohio, who retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2002, sensed that notion two years ago.

"I first got started looking for some tools; then realized I had a lot of things I could put up for auction [on eBay] that had just been sitting for 20 years," he said.

Through his enterprise, Mellenthin nourishes his hobbies.

"I do a lot of woodworking and metalworking," he said. "I used to do a lot of photography, so essentially I was swapping photo equipment for wood and metal shop tools."

Friebel, the San Antonio retiree, said selling on eBay has brought in funds sufficient for he and his wife Marjorie to buy a new computer and "retirement money to do whatever we want to do."

It's the fulfillment of that classic retiree line, which Friebel recites jokingly: "We're spending our kids' inheritance."

YSDO has been developing a unified software program called YSDO Commerce Management Suite ("CMS") that will enable users to add and monitor auctions on eBay. The CMS platform is web based and was designed to be very user friendly and intuitive. With a web based system the user can conduct and manage auctions from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. In addition, all the server maintenance and backups are performed by YSDO. YSDO has been using the software to manage its current auctions since it received approval.

YSDO will be sending Version 1.1 to eBay for its approval by September 1, 2005. The upgrades in the software will enable users to add store categories as well as handle Sold but not paid for items. Users will save a considerable amount of money per listing by using the YSDO CMS. A typical listing on eBay includes 1 free picture and then each additional picture is $.15, but with the YSDO CMS users will have the ability to post 6 pictures and save $.75 per listing.

The CMS software was designed as a key component of the Business Opportunity that YSDO has been developing. YSDO has received hundreds of requests for its Business Opportunity and will begin offering them along with CMS Version 1 by the end of August on a limited basis to ensure that CMS is operating as designed before a full release is launched, currently planned for September 2005.

YSDO will be contacting those individuals who expressed an interest in the YSDO Business Opportunity during the next two weeks to select the most qualified applicants to join the YSDO Team.

YSDO motto: "We turn your hidden treasures into cash!"

Certain information contained in this news release may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. While these statements are made to convey the company's progress, business opportunities and growth prospects, readers are cautioned that such forward-looking statements represent management's opinion. Actual company results may differ materially from those described. The company's operations and business prospects are always subject to risk and uncertainties. A more extensive listing of risks and factors that may affect the business prospects of the company and cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements can be found in the reports and other documents filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The casino was the winning bidder in a highly-publicized eBay auction of a candy wrapper which ended on August 12, 2005.

While monitoring online auction sites for the sale of illegal artifacts, Iraq Museum International, recognized in the candy wrapper auction a pattern it had been studying. Its line-by-line analysis of the auction's bidding history, still posted on eBay, shows that the casino was cheated by the actions of at least one other bidder.

Paul Nadjarian, director of parts and accessories for eBay Motors, usually pays more attention to how much car stuff is sold via the Internet auction site than actually buying anything.

But he recently bought 20 car seats from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s — along with five classic tires — that will be used in a lounge eBay Motors is setting up this week in Memorial Park at 13 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue in Royal Oak during the Woodward Dream Cruise. The annual event is Saturday.

It’s the first time eBay Motors, a division of San Jose, Calif.-based eBay Inc., will have a presence at the cruise. It is an official sponsor.

“There is so much going on during the cruise that if people remember we were there, what we’re about, that we are connected and are part of this community of enthusiasts … we’ll be successful,” Nadjarian said.

Other new sponsors are Mattel Inc., Microsoft Corp., Discount Tire Co., Delphi Corp., Bank One Corp., Dura Automotive Systems Inc., The Durr Group and Takata Holdings Inc.

Total sponsorships are up about 14 percent to about $475,000, said Jay Jennings, vice president of the board of directors for Woodward Dream Cruise Inc. The nonprofit had a goal of $450,000, he said.

Attracting big names gives the event more credibility, Jennings said.

“Also, it provides the recognition that Detroit really deserves for the classic cars and the cars that it still manufactures today,” Jennings said. “So it’s great to see the eBays, the Mattels and the Discount Tires sponsor the event.”

Nadjarian said how well eBay Motors connects with the crowd will determine the level of success.

“For us, this is an awareness event,” Nadjarian said. “Our biggest challenge is that people may be aware of eBay, but they may not be aware of eBay Motors.”

EBay Motors, which sells a car part or accessory every two seconds and a car every minute, plans to have several vehicles bought and sold via eBay Motors at the cruise. For example, the motorcycle signed by guests on “The Tonight Show” and auctioned to benefit victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster will be displayed.

The lounge will feature the seats set up around the tires, which will be converted into tables. Everything was bought via eBay Motors.

EBay also plans to have 12 computer terminals set up to educate the public about eBay Motors, along with a 12-foot-by-16-foot television screen that will feature video clips from the cruise. EBay Motors has more than 320 feet of frontage on Woodward. The company also plans to set up a special Web site dedicated to the cruise that will be linked to the eBay Motors home page.

Nadjarian didn’t want to say how much his site is spending on the cruise. He said it’s money well-spent, though, to get a shot at interacting with so many people in one spot.

In 1994, the first year of the cruise, about 350,000 people attended. As many as 1.7 million people could attend this year’s cruise, Jennings said.

But the fact that it’s only one day means people have limited attention and corporations have limited opportunity to leave a lasting impression, Nadjarian said.

That’s why people like Drew Dungan, director of communications at Rochester Hills-based Exhibit Enterprises Inc., said simply being associated with the cruise isn’t enough.

He said companies such as eBay Motors, Eaton Corp., the Saturn division of General Motors Corp., and the Dodge division of DaimlerChrysler AG are using the event more effectively than companies have in the past to show off services and products.

Saturn is setting up shop at the site of a vacant gas station at the southwest corner of Maple Road and Woodward in downtown Birmingham, the first time it has separated itself from the GM display.

The site will feature a Saturn Vue tricked out with an additional $100,000 in equipment and a Saturn Sky, the company’s new sporty-looking vehicle that comes out in 2006.

“It’s really the first time we have a car that plays into the spirit of what the Dream Cruise is all about,” said Tony Tarrottino, sales promotion manager for Saturn.

Dodge plans to show off its new Charger at the southwest corner of 13 Mile and Woodward.

Title sponsor Eaton paid $175,000 to have its name plastered all along the Dream Cruise route last year. But other than a hospitality tent that housed Eaton employees and customers, the company failed to engage cruise attendants, Dungan said.

This year, the company is hauling 500 yards of dirt to the Pontiac Silverdome, where it plans to set up a driving course that will help demonstrate its products. The course will feature ditches and hills designed to show off Eaton’s auto parts.

Eaton also plans to have a half-mile autocross course set up on pavement and a quarter-mile demonstration race track that will feature a professional driver.

Eaton plans to host a party for 500 customers and members of the media at the Silverdome the night before the cruise, said Jim Parks, Eaton’s director of public relations.

“We’re leveraging our sponsorship,” Parks said. “We wanted to engage with our customers rather than just slapping a logo on an event.”

Yahoo's far-reaching deal with him on Thursday has turned his company, Alibaba.com, into the largest online operation in China, where Internet use is growing at an explosive pace.

At a time when Microsoft, Google and eBay are seeking to expand their operations in China, Yahoo agreed to the largest Internet investment ever made here when it bet $1.7 billion on the future of Alibaba.com and its founder, Mr. Ma.

Jack Ma is only 40, and he started out teaching English. But he is now called the "grandfather of the Internet in China," even though he claims not to know much more about computers than how to send and receive e-mail.

His admirers and detractors both call him a clever salesman and savvy marketer who knows how to attract foreign money. But few expected him to pull off a deal that now values his company at more than $4 billion. Yahoo said on Thursday that it would invest $1 billion in the privately held Alibaba.com, which operates not only its namesake, a business-to-business auction site that mostly purveys Chinese goods to a worldwide market, but also the consumer auction site Taobao.com, a strong rival here to eBay.

In exchange for a 40 percent stake in Alibaba, Yahoo also agreed to hand over control of its Yahoo China operations, valued at $700 million, putting great confidence in Mr. Ma and his management team.

Some bankers say it was a brilliant stroke by Mr. Ma, playing off eBay against Yahoo. Both had pursued Alibaba in recent months, according to bankers involved in the Yahoo deal.

And over the years, this wiry, roughly five-foot-tall man with a big, cheeky smile, has surprised doubters again and again. "He's a visionary," says Mark Su, who works in San Francisco for the venture capital firm H&Q Asia Pacific. "He's been there at the forefront of a lot of trends in the Internet."

Mr. Ma has a penchant for clever puns, gimmicky marketing and brash talk. He does not hesitate to declare that his company will crush competitors like eBay.

And his critics have fought back by suggesting that Alibaba, which had about $46 million in revenue last year, is more marketing pizazz than substance. "It's looks like vapor," says Merle Hinrichs, chairman of Global Sources, a Hong Kong-based competitor to Alibaba in the business-to-business market. "Their numbers from our perspective are exaggerated."

Regardless, Mr. Ma is now one of China's most powerful chief executives. And he did not need an initial public offering to accomplish that.

He has in turn persuaded Goldman Sachs, the Japanese investment firm Softbank and now Yahoo to finance a company he founded in his apartment in 1999, helping transform it into a diversified Web conglomerate that offers e-mail, search functions and electronic payment services along with auctions.

At Alibaba's headquarters here in Hangzhou, two hours south of Shanghai, Mr. Ma spoke in fluent English on Saturday about how he came to win over Westerners, and Yahoo.

"A lot of people don't understand Alibaba," he said. "In the U.S., B-to-B companies died because they focused on big companies. We're focusing on small and medium-sized companies. We're helping them make money."

Mr. Ma grew up in Hangzhou, learning English as a youngster by listening to the Voice of America.

He failed his college entrance exam twice before finally being admitted to Hangzhou Teachers Institute. Once there, he excelled in English, and after graduation in 1988 he stayed on to teach there for five years. But even while teaching, he had an entrepreneurial impulse. He founded a translation agency in Hangzhou and also spent a year selling medicine to everyone from barefoot doctors to large hospitals.

And his move into the online world was not just accidental; it was, by his telling, bizarre. "It's a Hollywood story why I went into the Internet," he said, laughing.

In 1995, he said, he traveled to the United States to help a Chinese company recover money owed by a joint-venture partner, an American businessman. Mr. Ma says he went to the businessman's Malibu mansion, only to discover that he had no intention of repaying his debts.

The man displayed a gun, Mr. Ma said, and then locked him in the house for two days. Mr. Ma recalls talking his way out of the situation by agreeing to become the man's Chinese partner. He promised to start an Internet company in China, even though he had no idea how the Internet worked.

"It was a terrible experience," he said. "Every time I think of L.A., I have a nightmare. And today, my luggage is still in Malibu." He has had no further contact.

From there he flew to Seattle, where he told friends about his ordeal and then asked to see this thing called the Internet. He typed the words "beer" and "China" into Yahoo's search engine, and when nothing came back, he hit upon the idea of creating Web sites for Chinese companies. His translation company's home page went up first.

When he returned home, he quit his teaching post, borrowed $2,000 and started China Pages, one of the nation's first Internet companies.

He began creating home pages for Chinese companies with the help of friends in the United States. "The day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house," and on a very slow dial-up connection, "we waited three and a half hours and got half a page," he recalled. "We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the Internet existed."

Mr. Ma's company later formed a joint venture with a state-owned telecommunications company in a deal that he says went bad. He vowed never again to enter into a joint venture.

He then worked briefly in Beijing for the Ministry of Foreign Investment and Trade in a for-profit e-commerce venture. It was there that he made his first contact with Yahoo, when he gave a co-founder, Jerry Yang, a tour of the Great Wall in 1998, and the two became friends.

A year later, he went back to Hangzhou. By then he had honed his speaking skills, friends say, and had a following of loyal Internet enthusiasts. He also had a sense of destiny.

At a meeting with friends that he videotaped in his Hangzhou apartment in February 1999, Mr. Ma said, he formed Alibaba. "That day I talked like a crazy man," he recalled jokingly. "Then I said, 'Put your money on the table.' We had $60,000. That was our first round of financing."

Six months later, Goldman Sachs and a group of venture capital firms invested $5 million in Alibaba. Soon after, Masayoshi Son, the founder of Softbank, was at the door. "It was love at first sight," Mr. Ma said. Softbank, which initially invested $20 million, became one of its biggest backers.

In its first years, Alibaba had virtually no revenue model and often provided free services to help companies swap goods online. And it continued to find backers.

When the Internet bubble burst in 2000 and 2001, the company was forced to pare its operations. It also suffered through the SARS epidemic in 2003, with quarantined employees working on their computers from home.

But in 2003, around the same time that eBay acquired Eachnet.com, China's largest online auction house, Mr. Ma and Softbank found another way to jump-start interest in Alibaba: they created Taobao.com to go head to head with eBay in China.

Since then, the two auction houses have competed fiercely, with Taobao eating into some of eBay's customer base with its no-fee service, a money-losing effort that Alibaba hopes will eventually win enough customer support to turn into a fee-paying service.

Some competitors and critics question whether Alibaba is generating profit, but Joseph Tsai, the chief financial officer, says, "That's nonsense," calling the company "totally profitable." Alibaba's business-to-business operations generated $25 million of free cash flow last year, he said, "and this year we're going to be generating a lot more than that."

But even Mr. Ma acknowledged that Alibaba, searching for more traffic, needed a big partner.

He said he began seeing the importance that a search engine could play for auction deals. This past May, he met Mr. Yang at a conference in Pebble Beach, Calif., and the two agreed to team up on something. That talk evolved into Operation Pebble, or the Yahoo-Alibaba deal.

"The great challenge for a C.E.O. is saying no to opportunities," Mr. Ma said. "But you don't say no to Yahoo."

The deal - managed in part by Banc of America Securities and the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom for Yahoo, and by Seraphin Capital and the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton for Alibaba - was also pushed by Softbank, which has a stake in Yahoo as well as Alibaba and helped finance the start-up of Taobao.

Softbank made a huge profit on the Yahoo deal but still plowed some of that back into Alibaba, according to several bankers and lawyers, coming away with a 30 percent stake in the company.

Analysts are already questioning the deal. "The challenge which Alibaba now faces is whether it can manage a good business in so many different sectors," said Lu Benfu, an Internet analyst at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Mr. Ma's answer is that he has the focus and the foresight to make things happen. He indicated that earlier this year, when he saw competition brewing between Yahoo and eBay, with eBay promising to invest hundreds of millions in China in coming years, he saw an opportunity to strike a deal and shift the game.

Now, posing for photographs in his office, Mr. Ma is standing before the smiling Alibaba logo he designed. And his grin is wide.

"Thank you, eBay," he joked. But he is not altogether kidding when he adds, "You made all of this possible."

INTERNET auction sites like eBay are making many Britons richer while boosting the economy, it was claimed yesterday.

More than 50,000 households have already made about £3,000 by selling unwanted items online, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

The group says websites lift the value of second-hand goods by providing advertising space which maximises their price.

And with more than £4billion of trading likely to be carried out on eBay alone this year - equivalent to 1.3 per cent of total retail sales - economic growth seems sure to rise.

The CEBR said: "Auction sites increase competition, widen consum-

ers' choice and help keep down inflation both online and in the high street."

An autograph book containing the signatures of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and other famous freedom fighters has been put on auction by the online site ebay.in.

The item was put on auction Aug 9 by its owner, said to be a 75-year-old man from Shimla now settled in Mumbai. His name has not been disclosed by the site.

Priced at Rs.150,000, the item has been codenamed "ggrrb", reportedly by the owner's son-in-law.

It also has autographs of Liaquat Ali Khan and Sarojini Naidu, which the owner had obtained in 1945 at a gathering of Congressmen.

The owner had reportedly found the book while searching for some old photographs he had taken at the time.

Till Saturday there wasn't a single e-bid for the item, online site sources said.

The autograph book is on auction till Aug 16.

The owners of a Columbus store where customers can drop off items to be auctioned on eBay are putting their own business up for sale on the Internet site.

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The eBay drop-off store and consignment shop Your Outpost was placed on the site last Sunday. The highest bid on the store as of noon today was about one thousand dollars. Bidding lasts through tomorrow.

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The two men who own the store say they're selling because it has become too time consuming to manage with their other jobs.

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An eBay spokesman said Your Outpost was likely the first eBay drop-off store to be sold on the site.

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The winning bidder gets all the inventory, the remainder of a two-year lease and the business's client list.

The New York Palace Hotel in Manhattan has an auction on eBay for the famous bar that was in the Le Cirque 2000 restaurant. Famous for the architecture and the celebrities who sat there, this bar can now be owned by anybody.

(PRWEB) August 9, 2005 -- New York City's world-famous Le Cirque 2000 restaurant closed in late 2004. It was known for its fabulous French cuisine as much as it was known for the frequent visits from celebrities and international dignitaries, often seen around the bar. As the beginning of its effort to clear the abandoned restaurant for something new, the New York Palace Hotel is auctioning the legendary bar on eBay.

As Was, an eBay Certified Service Provider, designed the custom template used for this auction. "We’re proud to have been a part of such a fun and unique project," remarked As Was Founder and President, Debbie Levitt. "Any individual or restaurateur now has the opportunity to own a piece of New York’s culinary and social history."

Adam Hersh Auctions, one of eBay's most successful and prominent Trading Assistants, is managing the auctions. AHA photographed the bar, wrote the description, determined strategies for the listings, and acted as liaison with eBay. Adam Hersh, CEO of AHA, explains, "We're really excited at the opportunity to help sell a piece of New York City history."

This auction launched on Friday, August 5, 2005 and ends Monday, August 15, 2005. To place your bids now, please follow the auction links from the New York Palace case study page on the As Was website at http://www.aswas.com/showcase-nypalace.shtml" title="http://www.aswas.com/showcase-nypalace.shtml" target="_blank"http://www.aswas.com/showcase...


About As Was:
As Was is a full-service consulting firm specializing in eBay and online sales, business creation and operations management, traditional and niche marketing, and website development. As Was is uniquely poised to improve eBay and online businesses through design, creation and presentation of the seller’s identity, sales and marketing strategies, research, training, and other services. As Was has been making the world’s marketplace your marketplace since it was founded in April 1995, and has been an

Online retailing giant eBay and the U.S. Postal Service are bringing their Small Business Tour to Phoenix Aug. 17-19.
 
The tour will bring experts from both organizations to teach area residents how to buy, sell, ship and grow their business online. The three-day event provides hands-on training, resources and small business specialists from eBay, the Postal Service and Entrepreneur magazine.

Since 2003, the Postal Service and eBay have worked together to provide small businesses the tools to succeed in business, whether from home or from an existing brick and mortar location.

More than 724,000 people are currently making a part- or full-time living selling on eBay and one in six Arizona residents is a registered eBay user.

The tour will be held from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. on the 17th through the 19th at Double Tree Inn, 5401 N. Scottsdale Road.

The tour will include several education areas such as a traveling home office lab in which an eBay small business expert will host one-on-one consultations on how to scale and build an eBay business.

A separate event, eBay University, will be held from 9 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. Aug. 20 at the Holiday Inn Hotel Mesa, 1600 S. Country Club in Mesa. EBay University is an in-depth educational session with three educational tracks, "eBay for Business" (presented by Entrepreneur magazine), "Selling Basics" and "Beyond the Basics."

Current or soon-to-be eBay users can learn about creating listings, determining pricing and managing listings to starting an online business. Other focus areas include tax tips, best practices, shipping options and tips for online safety and marketing.

Pre-registration for the free Small Business Tour is available online at usps.com/ebayday.

EBay University costs $59, although those who register by Aug. 19 at ebay.com/university can bring a friend for free.

When a medical technology company paid $12,000 for the services of Adam Nelson in May they probably did not realise what a bargain they had.

Nelson, who was born, lives and trains in America but is a member of Birchfield Harriers, won the World Championship shot putt title on Saturday with a best of 21.73 metres but at the start of this season did not have the money needed to continue his training.

"I was still without a sponsor coming into the outdoor season. We needed some money to get through the first half of the year so I decided to put myself up for auction on eBay," said Nelson, who joined the Stags four years ago to come under the auspices of former international shot-putter Bob Weir, now the head shot putt coach for the United States team.

He offered himself for a month of promotional duties and MedivoxRx won the bid.

"I had over 100 bids and over 12,000 hits on the auction site," the 30-year-old said. "$12,000 for a month pays a couple of food bills."

The move paid off and after finishing runner-up at the last two World Championships and Olympic Games, Nelson finally claimed his first global title.

On a wet Helsinki evening, Nelson gave his all in the opening round and held on for the gold ahead of Rutger Smith of the Netherlands.

Nelson said he thought his problems obtaining sponsorship were because of the bad publicity his event sometimes attracted.

"I think it's time that sponsors should change their minds when they see the support we get internationally," he said

The bloodstained bandage that wrapped Ariel Sharon's head after he was injured in fighting during the 1973 Middle East War has been offered for sale on eBay with the bidding starting at $10,000.

Sharon, the current prime minister, was a top general on the Egyptian front during the war. He was wounded when his armored vehicle was damaged by Egyptian forces at the Suez Canal, and pictures of Sharon meeting with officials and planning strategy with his head bandaged were among the most widely circulated images of the war.

The seller, who refused to be publicly identified, said he was the son of an army medic who treated Sharon's wound. The medic kept the bloodstained bandage when he put a fresh one on Sharon's head, the seller said in a message on the internet auction site.

The seller said his father had kept the bandage as a souvenir in a closet.

By Monday afternoon, after more than two days on the site, no one had bid on the bandage on eBay.

Todd Frankland set a minimum bid of $125,000 for a pair of platinum seats two rows from the ice.

Bidding began Monday and closes Aug. 18, at 1 p.m. EDT.

A second adjoining pair is expected to be auctioned off Aug. 15, ending at 4 p.m. on Aug. 25.

There were no offers as of Monday afternoon.

Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment reportedly has a waiting list of more than 6,000 hockey fans desperate to have seats in the platinum section of the Air Canada Centre - a cushy spot with perks like privileged access to the Platinum Restaurant and an entrance separate from the masses.

Frankland hopes ardent fans are desperate enough to pay several times the tickets' face value - four platinum season tickets and a club membership would normally sell for $41,160.

"We've held these rights since the 1940s," Frankland writes in the ad.

"When the Maple Leafs Gardens closed, we paid $30,000 per seat to maintain these rights for the opening of the Air Canada Centre."

Frankland is president of a Brampton, Ont., business that designs and builds modular space items including interior wall systems and prefabricated buildings.

In what must be considered the adult, e-commerce equivalent of "the dog ate my homework", a New York man has fingered his own daughter for accidently buying on eBay a 1969 Mercedes once owned by Elvis Presley for a cool $245,000.

Jason Shepherd used eBay's "Buy it Now!" facility to secure the automobile, or rather, he didn't, because he reckons "that the bid was a mistake made when his daughter accidentally hit a key on his computer".

That's how the Merc's owner, Gene Epstein of Philadelphia, describes Shepherd's epic excuse for renegeing on the deal. For his part, Epstein is having none of it, and is suing Shepherd for the cash plus $150k in damages. His lawsuit - filed in the US District Court in Philadelphia - states: "Once an item is removed from the active sale list on eBay and listed as sold, its reappearance on the active auction listings creates the impression that the item being sold is in some way unsaleable or unmarketable."

In an attack of good sense, though, Epstein says he will drop the matter if Shepherd issues an apology as drafted by Epstein himself, and coughs up a token amount. ®

Yahoo and eBay have pulled an offer to sell a 20,000-name mailing list of US investors from their auction sites. Direct-marketing firm Market Logisitics offered the list which includes names, email addresses and telephone numbers.

The two companies pulled the item off their auction sites saying that it violated their terms of service, which forbid the disclosure of personal data. The information would be of great value to marketers and spammers, although those on the list may not be so happy about its sale.

This auction is a play on words after two popular hip hop artists: an M&M wrapper with a starting bid of 50 cents. In less than 5 Days Bids have reached $830 and 18,000+ Hits.

Scottsdale, AZ (PRWEB) August 7, 2005 -- Remember when a grilled cheese sandwich with the image of the Virgin Mary was sold on eBay for thousands of dollars? You will never believe what an Arizona and Virginia resident are selling.

"Right now, up for sale is just an M&M wrapper and that's the M&M wrapper - there's nothing else," said Brian Schwartz of Scottsdale, also known as EZas123 on eBay.

Shawn Stifflet from Virginia, also widely known as WooHooMysteryMan on eBay, has been a regular on "eBay's Pulse", which features the top 10 most watched auctions.

After seeing some of Schwartz's graphic design, marketing techniques and web related skills, WooHooMysteryMan had contacted Schwartz with an idea to collaborate and sell a Candy Wrapper in a clever way.

They have combined their efforts to bring this idea to life. It sure is a success. With 5 days still remaining, it has already attracted 18,000 visitors and now featured as the #6 most watched auction on all of eBay and slowly but surely climbing it's way to #1.

The whole thing is a humorous, graphic enhanced play on words after two popular hip hop artists: an M&M wrapper with a starting bid of 50 cents.

The surprising part is that the latest bid is at $830. You don't even get the M&Ms inside.

Schwartz is not surprised people are willing to dish out the big bucks.

"I've seen people sell pieces of burnt toast for thousands of dollars. It's amazing to see the buying patterns of eBayers. We're just trying to bring a fresh new approach with this collaboration and hope it ups the level of competition and creativity among eBay members for the top spot on eBay Pulse."

The old saying seems to hold true - one man's trash is another man's treasure.

Auction ends August 12th.

eBay Item: 5603612307

You can find quality second-hand clothes at Selective Seconds in Mooresville, and, thanks to the eBay phenomenon, anyone else in the world can too.

Selective Seconds began as a way for the owner Vena Holden to earn some extra money while she worked at her professional job at a law office. She eventually opened the store and then a second one in Greenwood, according to the store’s Web site.

The manager of the Mooresville store, Debbie State, said that while they are successful in selling their consigners’ items, eBay gives them another outlet — especially for some of the higher priced items.

“In a smaller town like Mooresville, when you can get a worldwide audience, you’ve added value to their item,” State said. “We get a lot of nice items through here because it’s a small town. But we can get more money for it in a world wide market than we could if it just sat on our floor.”

But the Internet isn’t for just any items, like K-mart and Walmart brands, they generally just put higher priced items on eBay, clothing or other pieces that are worth more than $75.

But overall eBay is another way to help them sell items for their consigners.

“We have a wide variety of items in the shop and sometimes we’ll try something on the floor for a while and then on the Internet,” State said.

The Internet auction is such a good tool that State even uses it on her own outside of work to raise money for her child’s college education.

State said that anyone whobrings in items to Selective Seconds can ask them to put them on eBay for them, but that it’s also very easy to use for anyone.

“It’s like anything else,” State said. “That first initial step seems hard, but once you do it, it’s easy.

“If I can do it, anyone can.”

And many people in the area do try their own hand at selling items on eBay.

eBay survey in Morgan County

Recently, 30 Morgan County residents were asked to share their thoughts about the eBay environment. Seventeen of them said they had tried eBay at least once. Eight claimed they had sold items on the worldwide market, and 14 said they had purchased items.

Live auction vs. eBay

From the 30 respondents, 21 said they had attended a live auction at one time or another, however, 11 said they prefer eBay. Seven said they prefer live auctions, and four people said they enjoyed both because each had their own unique benefits. Three people said they don’t like either one.

What do users like about the eBay community?

Some said it was the ability to purchase items from everywhere in the United States and abroad. Others said it was the selection and the huge variety of items, from unique and/or vintage items to brand new.

Some people think that the 24-hour-a-day shopping is handy, while others feel the program was easily accessible. But the overwhelming majority said it is the convenience of being able to shop from their home that sells them on the idea.

What are they buying?

It seems that eBay shoppers buy just about anything. One person bought a Peyton Manning jersey, a rare Care Bear and wildflower seeds. Another shopper bought golf clubs and charms. Other purchases included a conduit bender, solar panel fountain pump, Charlie Brown items, books, clothes, baby formula coupons, car parts, candle holders, pop-up camper, music, movies, cell phone batteries, toys, saw blades — and the list goes on.

As for selling, Morgan County folks have unloaded old weight machines, computers, NASCAR and Pacer tickets, collector dolls, electronics and books.

Christy Jacoby, a 1997 graduate of Martinsville High School, and an artist by nature, buys new and vintage “My Little Ponies,” which normally can be purchased for $3 to $5. She repaints or places different color stones in their eyes, re-roots their mane and tail hair, paints unique designs on them and re-sells them at eBay auctions as “Custom My Little Ponies.”

The beautifully decorated ponies bring anywhere from $10 to $75 depending on their theme.

How does eBay work?

An item is displayed on eBay for a set period of time (often 7 days). During this time, any user can bid on the item over the Internet. The current high bid, and bid history are constantly updated and displayed.

Bidding is by proxy and often gets intense. At a designated moment, the sale ends. The high bidder and seller contact each other to arrange the details of the merchandise exchange.

The buyer usually sends payment by PayPal, credit card, money order, or check to the seller. Upon receiving money, the seller sends the goods by mail.

Buyer and seller “grade” each other on the transaction through a feedback forum.

eBay does not possess the item, does not guarantee it, and does not intervene in the transaction.

How did eBay begin?

EBay has a unique and interesting history. It sounds like a modern day American dream that came true. eBay’s founder, Peirre Omidyar, was born in Paris in 1967 to a French-Iranian family. Omidyar’s father was a doctor and his mother a linguist. They immigrated to the United States when Omidyar was six years old. Omidyar acquired an early fascination with computers.

In the mid-1980’s he attended Tufts University, a few miles from Boston. It was just as the tech world was about to explode. His major was computer science, and his passion was Apple programming. In his junior year, Omidyar decided he wanted to spend the summer as a Macintosh programmer, landing a summer internship in Silicon Valley with Innovative Data Design. The internship turned into a full-time job, and he sat out the fall semester to work.

In the spring, after finishing one more semester at Tufts, Omidyar, moved west for good and finished his undergraduate work at the University of California-Berkeley.

As the 1990s moved in, Omidyar wanted to do more with the Internet and looked for a job that allowed him to work with it. In the summer of 1995, Omidyar was doing what every other smart tech person was doing — obsessing about the Internet and its potential uses.

Omidyar’s fiance, Pam Wesley, collected PEZ dispensers and mentioned that she was having trouble finding fellow collectors to trade with. Omidyar, who was intrigued by the auction marketplace, as well as the possibilities of the Internet, started thinking.

On Labor Day weekend 1995, Omidyar came home on a Friday night with an idea of writing a simple programs, which would create an auction-type atmosphere on the Internet. By Monday morning he had the program up and running. Omidyar’s home computer ran on a regular dial-up service. The first day he posted his brain child he didn’t draw one single customer. But that was soon to change.

After the holiday, listings started to trickle in and by the end of 1995, his new site had hosted thousands of auctions and attracted more than 10,000 individual bids.

Despite its popularity and ease of use, some people are afraid to shop eBay, but the network is surprisingly secure, and the process is just as easy as writing out a check in a department store.

eBay now boasts 9,000 employees and 135 million customers worldwide. According to Meg Whitman, eBay's CEO, if eBay were a country it would be the ninth most populated nation in the world. The online marketplace is estimated to earn $4.2 billion dollars a year.

How is all this money handled?

You can imagine with all this money changing hands, it became necessary for eBay to offer assistance with online transactions. In today's world, online shoppers are no safer from the criminal element than a person visiting the mall. Therefore, online marketers were forced to take action to protect their customers.

eBay's answer was to purchase PayPal, a payment service company that allows anyone with an e-mail address to send and receive money online. The service allows you to pay for an auction item (or online purchase), send money to family or friends, or pay bills online. PayPal is offered in 38 countries and five currencies.

PayPal is an account-based service that allows customers to send and receive money using their credit card, bank account, or a PayPal balance. In order to initiate a payment, the customer must log into his/her account, enter the e-mail address of the recipient and the dollar amount, and select the funding option. After the payment is completed, PayPal then sends an e-mail notification (receipt) to both the sender and recipient of the payment. The recipient can then keep the funds in his/her PayPal account, request a paper check, or withdraw the funds to his/her bank account via Electronic Funds Transfers. PayPal also offers a debit card, which affords customers the additional flexibility of using their PayPal funds to either withdraw money at the ATM or pay for products anywhere MasterCard is accepted.

PayPal takes every precaution to protect eBay's customers, however, there are still those waiting to rip-off the unsuspecting buyer.

The con game

Locally, from the 17 eBay enthusiasts who responded to the survey, four said they had been ripped off by someone on the site. Two users said they had been ripped off more than once. Three users said they paid for items they did not receive, and one stated the shipping cost was high and the item was advertised deceptively.

One person purchased a DVD and received a copy of one that didn’t work, and another received a cell phone battery that didn’t work. Criminal charges were not pursued in any of the cases. Purchasers felt it would cost more to take legal action than the items originally cost.

Criminal cases are rarely pursued in these matters; one of the major reasons is because they are a jurisdictional nightmare.

The Morgan County Sheriff’s Department receives between one to five eBay complaints a month from the Internet Fraud Complaint Center. Often the victim lives in Morgan County; however, the suspect is in another state or country.

Bob Cline, from the Morgan County Prosecutors office, believes that the jurisdiction in which the suspect actually acquired his/her ill-gained funds is the one responsible for filing criminal charges.

Many jurisdictions don’t have the manpower to investigate these types of cases and some set a dollar amount on the cases they will accept.

Morgan County officials don’t have a minimum requirement, however, when victims are from other states and/or countries and the suspects live in Morgan County; it isn’t always feasible for the victim to travel here to testify in a criminal case — especially when the item may have only cost $50 and the victim lives in England.

Like other fake e-mails going around asking people to update their banking information or asking them to open an account for some poor soul in Nigeria who will send them thousands of dollars, PayPal has not escaped the would-be scammers. A recent email was sent around that read like this:

“Dear PayPal User,

You have added 60_yuna_baby_60@yahoo.com as a new email address for your PayPal account. If you did not authorize this change or if you need assistance with your account, please contact PayPal customer service at:

http://www.paypalonlineupdate.info/index.htm?emd=login-run" title="http://www.paypalonlineupdate.info/index.htm?emd=login-run" target="_blank"http://www.paypalonlineupdate...

Thank you for using PayPal!”

The PayPal Team.

These e-mails look real and are easy to fall for. Once you’ve logged onto their site, they ask for your password. PayPal will never ask you for your password. Do not give out that type of information.

With buying and selling going on around the world, the eBay phenomenon and scams associated with it, present a new dilemma for law enforcement. However, strides are being made to catch these new-age criminals and both eBay and PayPal request that any type of theft, fraud or illegal practices be reported to them immediately.

The Silicon Valley Better Business Bureau reported that in the past 36 months eBay has had 1,997 complaints filed against them. Of these complaints, 200 were concerning selling practices, 26 were concerning advertising, 917 were concerning service, 466 were concerning credit or billing, 70 were concerning delivery, 240 were concerning the refund practice, 36 were concerning product quality, eight were concerning contract disputes and six were concerning guarantee or warranty issues.

Both organizations have reporting procedures set up on-line with easy to follow instructions. You may also file complaints with the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC) at ifccfbi.gov or with local law enforcement.

The government auctioned off the ship, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, some years back, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported. The purchaser, Dan Burry, who operates a dockyard in Clarenville, Newfoundland, and owns Star Line Inc., is now trying to pass it on.

Burry is still confident of a sale even though no one met the opening price of $1 million.

"It's just getting the right offer for the vessel," he told the CBC. "It's going at a bargain, but it's not a giveaway."

Burry suggests a number of uses for the Gilbert, in addition to its customary task of clearing ice-choked shipping lanes. He believes it could be used as a floating casino or for scientific research.

There's an Eminem--autographed brick back on eBay.

Livonia resident Timothy Schweigel was the high bidder at $163.80 on brick No. 24 out of 30 autographed by the rapper and put on eBay as part of a charity auction to benefit the Eight Mile Boulevard Association and Marshall Mathers Foundation.

The bricks were taken from the demolished Detroit Artillery Armory on 8 Mile in Oak Park.

On Wednesday, Schweigel put the brick back on eBay, with a minimum bid of $300.

Tami Salisbury, executive director of the Eight Mile Boulevard Association, which came up with the idea, said she was concerned buyers wouldn't know that Schweigel's brick wasn't part of the charity auction. His auction ends today; the others Tuesday.

But Schweigel said in an email to the Free Press on Friday that he intends to share the proceeds. "I will donate 50% of my net profits, to be split evenly between the Eight Mile Boulevard and the Marshall Mathers Foundation, simply because I don't want Eminem to make a rap song about me," he said.

My grandmother, Big Mama, never liked flea markets or yard sales.

"You're just buying other people's junk," Big Mama would say.

But my grandmother never had a chance to see the growth of eBay, the online flea market and yard sale extraordinaire.

I've never bought or sold anything on eBay but I have spent time window-shopping on the site.

As eBay has grown, you can buy anything, from a CD to collectibles to a car. While millions of people see eBay as a one-time opportunity to unload unwanted items, a growing number of people are using it as a chance to make a little extra cash or start a small business. Some folks have been able to make a good living selling stuff on this online auction site.

In fact, in a new study conducted for eBay by ACNielsen International Research, more than 724,000 Americans report that selling on eBay is their primary or secondary source of income. In addition to these professional eBay sellers, 1.5 million other individuals say they supplement their income this way, according to the July survey. In the first six months of 2005, eBay members in the United States sold merchandise worth about $10.6 billion.

So would you like to get in on this action? If you do, I suggest you get a copy of "The eBay Millionaire" by Amy Joyner (Wiley, $22.95). Joyner is a former business and technology reporter and now columnist for The News & Record in Greensboro, N.C. For more than three years, Joyner has run her own eBay business, and her book offers advice based on her experiences.

But the bulk of the book focuses on profiles of 18 successful eBay businessmen and women, whom the site crowns "Titanium PowerSellers." If you sell at least $150,000 a month on eBay, you get this top-level status.

The highly profitable sellers Joyner profiles come from all around the country and sell a variety of products, from vintage Rolex watches to golf balls to costume jewelry.

There are many eBay hucksters around -- people who promise that amateurs can earn quick and easy riches by selling on the Web site," Joyner writes. "But these top-level PowerSellers are frank about the hard work that is required to truly build a multimillion- dollar business."

It's the stories of these PowerSellers and the question- and-answer sections at the end of each chapter (with each online merchant) that make this book interesting.

Here are some of the successful selling strategies from top eBay sellers:

Net2Auction's business and home pickup service will focus on companies and customers with $500 or more worth of items to be sold on eBay through Net2Auction. The pickup service will be available in select areas, and if successful, it is intended that Net2Auction will expand this pickup service along with the expansion of its 44 eBay drop-off locations in territories nationwide.

Delmar Janovec, Net2Auction president, commented, "We believe our business and home pickup service will be a smash hit, and we are seeing a strong niche that we intend to fulfill. Focusing on businesses and customers with $500 or more worth of merchandise to be sold on eBay, we are already beginning to schedule pickups.

"At this point, after streamlining our order processing operations, we simply need to streamline the pickup service and focus on obtaining as many pickup orders as possible in order to fulfill pickup capacity.

"We believe the business and home pickup service of high-dollar items could grow tremendously, as we could create the capacity for each truck to run several pickup orders per day at $500 in merchandise or more. Assuming our pickup service is successful, we would expand the service with trucks in additional territories, anticipating the number of pickup orders and total dollar volume will multiply," Janovec concluded.

Net2Auction's pickup service is ideal for companies and customers with high-dollar merchandise to be sold on eBay, or for those who have several items that would add up to more than $500 in value. Items that may be ideal for sale on eBay through Net2Auction include electronic and computer equipment, office equipment, antiques, art, sporting goods, auto parts, and more.

Examples of ideal pickup items that Net2Auction has recently listed include a $2,000 Persian rug and two strapping machines that sold for $858, in addition to a set of rare lithographs and manufactured popcorn equipment that were offered at $12,000 and $7,500, respectively.

For more information on Net2Auction's eBay pickup service, please visit http://www.net2auction.com/pickup.html" title="http://www.net2auction.com/pickup.html" target="_blank"http://www.net2auction.com/pi....

Net2Auction is positioning itself to be the fastest-growing company in its space in terms of establishing eBay drop-off locations at a faster rate than any other company in the marketplace.

Net2Auction allows people to easily sell their items on eBay by dropping unwanted goods off at company locations. The company provides a full-service eBay auction listing program that boasts a customer satisfaction rating that exceeds 99%. Selling on eBay with Net2Auction is easy -- customers just bring valuable, yet unwanted goods into a Net2Auction drop-off location and we do all of the work.

Customers can get in and out of our store in less than five minutes, and we take care of all the eBay selling tasks including product description, photos, payment processing and collection, and shipping. In exchange for providing eBay drop-off and consignment services to its customers, Net2Auction charges a service fee against the final sale price of the item.

With national expansion plans and currently offering eBay drop-off services at 44 locations through partnership with pack and ship centers, Net2Auction has a winning formula for success: we have minimal cost of inventory, we are undergoing rapid expansion, and we earn lucrative consignment fees while making our customers money.

As auction drop-off services such as Net2Auction are gaining the momentum that has been expected, industry analysts expect this exponential growth to continue.

More information is available at www.Net2Auction.com. Investors and media can receive a free investor kit for Net2Auction Inc. by contacting Investor Relations at investors@net2auction.com or 800-450-1935. Net2Auction's virtual store tour and promotional video can be viewed at http://www.net2auction.com/videos.html" title="http://www.net2auction.com/videos.html" target="_blank"http://www.net2auction.com/vi....

About Net2Auction

Net2Auction Inc. is a leading provider of auction drop-off services that allow people to easily sell their items on eBay by dropping unwanted goods off at Net2Auction locations. Getting its customers in and out of its drop-off locations in less than five minutes, the company offers a full-service eBay listing program that requires almost no effort on the customers' part.

Currently offering eBay drop-off services at 44 locations and undergoing rapid expansion, Net2Auction's growth is fueled by the increasing number of consumers who would like to sell unwanted goods on eBay but don't have the time, energy, or know-how to do so.

Net2Auction -- You bring it in. We auction it online.

The information contained in this press release may include forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements usually contain the words "estimate," "anticipate," "believe," "expect," or similar expressions that involve risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties include the company's uncertain profitability, need for significant capital, uncertainty concerning market acceptance of its products, competition, limited service and manufacturing facilities, dependence on technological developments and protection of its intellectual property. The company's actual results could differ materially from those discussed herein.

A YOUNG family desperate to emigrate to New Zealand have put their home on eBay in a last-ditch attempt to sell it.

Lara and Jeremy Ashley, of Edward Road, Croydon, want to start a new life with their two children, 15-month-old Ben and Felicity, two.

They put their three-bedroom house on the market in April, but after months without a sniff of a sale decided drastic action was needed and posted an advert on the popular auction site.

IT consultant Jeremy, 37, said: "It was a way to reach as many potential buyers as possible. When you are trying to sell you tell your friends, your neighbours, everyone, so this seemed like a logical step. I looked on the internet and I saw a lot of people were advertising their houses this way so why not?"

Lara, 36, added: "The market is really down at the moment. We're so keen to sell it we'll try anything. We haven't had any hits so far but even if we don't get any it hasn't cost us much to do."

The pair are no strangers to the auction website and have been buying and selling items on eBay for years. They even bought the family car, a Vauxhall Astra, online for the bargain price of £400.

Lara said: "I have had a couple of clangers. I bought a sewing machine that was useless and I ended up buying another, but on the whole we've done really well on eBay. I sold a lot of the children's things, like a car-seat they'd both grown out of, and got a good price for it. I think people are getting more and more confident about using the internet to shop."

Lara and Jeremy are the second Croydon couple to turn to the net as a way of trying to sell their home.

David and Ellen Forrester were so keen to avoid paying estate agents' fees that they tried to sell their house, in Tilford Avenue, New Addington, online.

But, despite 350 people taking an online tour of the property, they did not receive a single offer and were forced to try a more traditional route to help fulfil their dream of moving to Norfolk.

The Ashley's end-of-terrace, which has an asking price of £222,500, is registered with a local estate agent, but if they make a sale using their internet advert it could save them thousands.

Lara said: "Estate agents are really an introductory service and the fees are high. If we do sell via our eBay advert we'll have an extra few thousand to play with when we get to New Zealand."

An internet conman fleeced sports fans of thousands of pounds before being caught with the help of the Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, a court heard yesterday.

Robert Housden used the auction site eBay to sell bogus memorabilia that included a pair of boots supposedly signed by David Beckham, the England captain.

Customers bombarded Housden, 19, with bids believing them to be genuine autographed shirts from teams including England and Brazil. In reality they were poor-quality replicas he had signed himself with a marker pen.

Housden, who was desperate to pay off loans and gambling debts, pocketed up to £40,000 through the fraud. He was caught after trading standards officers met Sir Alex and his players to obtain a genuine shirt with real signatures, and then checked them against the fakes.

Leicester Crown Court was told how Housden set up a genuine on-line sports memorabilia business after leaving school at 16 with 10 GCSEs.

But he soon found himself struggling to pay back the man who had loaned him the start-up funds.

An experienced collector, who paid £200 for a "signed" Manchester United shirt, recognised the signatures as fake.

Housden, from Shepshed, Leics, admitted 14 charges of obtaining cash transfers by deception, and one of obtaining a cheque by deception. He asked for 57 similar offences to be considered. The case was adjourned until next month.

By Kevin Kelleher
TheStreet.com Senior Writer
8/4/2005 2:35 PM EDT 

eBay's (EBAY:Nasdaq - commentary - research) growing PayPal online payment service has discontinued the bill-pay service it offered customers, even as the company seeks to push PayPal beyond the eBay marketplace platform to more users.

PayPal suspended the BillPay function on Aug. 1 after notifying users to find alternative means to pay their bills. "We found it wasn't as popular as other features the people were using," said Sara Bettencourt, a PayPal spokesperson. "We decided our resources would be better used on more popular programs" such as buyer protection programs, which are a bigger concern for users.

Feedback received during eBay's recent eBay Live jamboree, where sellers on its marketplace gather once a year, and from other users, indicated low interest for BillPay. Web sites run by banks and other companies offer bill-paying services, but charge a monthly fee that often exceeds the cost of postage when the checks are sent by mail.

PayPal has been a strong engine of revenue growth for eBay. PayPal's revenue grew 49% to $237 million in the company's recent second quarter, nearly double the 28% growth rate of eBay's core U.S. marketplace operations. eBay executives tied the PayPal growth in good part to its efforts to push the service beyond the eBay platform for a wider acceptance of merchants, both online and off.

eBay is working to shape PayPal into a method of online payment that it hopes will be as common, if not more common, than credit cards. While the service aims to offer less risk and lower cost for buyers and sellers, some users have complained of what they consider sluggish customer support and often inflexible terms, while other users receive emails purporting to be from PayPal that instead fraudulently fish for their passwords.

While seeking to push PayPal into an all-in-one payment for shopping, the removal of the BillPay feature appears to be a step away from that goal.

"This isn't to say we wouldn't consider it again," said Bettencourt. "We might think about it again down the road if there are a large number of people who want it."

Shares of eBay were recently off 70 cents, or 1.6%, to $43.85.

By David Meier
August 4, 2005

More than 150 items have been put up for sale including original 1981 Hunger Strike posters and a gun-shaped badge posted just two hours after the July 28 4pm statement.

Second-hand books, CDs, DVDs and bumper stickers also feature in the mass sell-off by anonymous vendors in Belfast, Derry and London anxious to profit from the IRA’s decision to go out of business.

A May 1981 copy of Republican newspaper, An Phoblacht, which was shrunk down to be smuggled into Republican prisoners on hunger strike in the H-blocks, has been bid up to €65 by 13 potential buyers.

The Belfast-based seller of the item said on the site: “In this edition, there is an exclusive interview with the IRA and pictures on two pages of an IRA training camp.”

A 1981 Hunger Strike poster featuring prisoners Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara is currently fetching bids of €59.53.

The vendor says: “You will get this for a bargain as I should be keeping it for next year for the 25th anniversary but it’s on sale now.”

The highest bid item in the IRA category is an Irish Easter Rising 1916 medal currently priced at €827 by 27 bidders.

Despite brisk bidding across the site, a copy of Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams’ memoirs, Hope and History, signed by the author, has so far failed to attract any bidders.

A biography of Martin McGuinness entitled IRA: From Guns To Government was put on the ebay site just five hours after the armed campaign officially ended at 4pm on July 28.

Tim Pat Coogan’s book, The IRA, is being offered for €10.89 by a Co Down reader.

Mr Coogan, a former Irish Press editor, said: “I’d have thought it would go for a bit more, but there you are. There seems to have been a lot of interest in the IRA recently, especially among younger people who want to know the history and background.”

Despite recent developments, Mr Coogan has ruled out another edition of the paperback. It was first published in 1970 and last revised by the author in 2000 to include the Good Friday Agreement.

Earlier this year, a bugging device which Sinn Féin claimed had been planted at its Belfast offices by MI5 appeared for sale on eBay. 

Rudy Prins, who rubbed elbows with Ottawa's movers and shakers as a senior manager at the Chateau Laurier and Skyline hotels, is selling the tie autographed by Trudeau in 1968 on EBay.

Bids start at $18,500, but he is hoping to score up to $35,000 for the Trudeaumania memento.

"This is a tie where all the newspapers in the world had a picture of him hanging himself with that tie and it was front page," he said.

During a dinner at the National Press Club, Trudeau made the comical gesture that was captured on film.

Prins asked if he could switch ties with the PM, who agreed, and signed the back to boot.

Prins doesn't feel more than a pinch of pain at the thought of parting with the piece of history.

"I figure I can buy a better car rather than have a tie in a drawer," he said.

"I'd have a lot more sentimentality parting with the menu signed by Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier than with the Trudeau tie."

Prins, who has not yet received any bids on EBay, thinks the federal government should buy the tie to ensure it remains in Canadian hands rather than a museum abroad.

Denis Schryburt, acting press secretary for Heritage Minister Liza Frulla, said the government is determining the historical relevance of the tie to see if it is an item that the government might be interested in acquiring.

The Burry Group of Clarenville, Nfld., is offering the Polar Prince on EBay's auction website with a reserve price of $1.2 million, the lowest price the company will accept from bidders.

"Why not? It's there. It's international -- and almost everyone that has a computer has access to it," said Dan Burry, general manager of Clarenville Drydock Ltd., a subsidiary of the Burry Group.

"With EBay you've got a world market. There could be somebody over in Siberia saying, 'My God, that's exactly what I need right now.' "

The 73-metre ship is better known as the Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker and lighthouse supply ship that was based in Newfoundland.

It was built in 1959 and modernized in 1986 at the Halifax Shipyard.

By July 2002, it was sold to the Burrys for $212,000, and the new owners did another major refit of the ship.

It then was assigned to the company's marine subsidiary, Star Line Inc.

As the Polar Prince, the ship's duties included transporting freight to the Arctic and tracking ice for the Terra Nova oilfield partners.

It's not the first time the ship has been for sale.

The company hired a broker to sell it for $1.6 million. At the time, the ship's certification had expired.

Burry says the Polar Prince was also listed on EBay a few weeks ago and he may list it again if it doesn't sell this time.

If the reserve price is met, Burry is offering 40 tonnes of fuel and a good coat of paint for the hull and topsides as part of the deal.

The EBay listing also says the company will consider a long-term charter or lease-to-buy rather than an outright purchase.

"For her age, she's in exceptionally good condition," said Burry.

"She's well kept and we just got all her underwater certifications done. It wouldn't take much now to finish her up, just a good coat of paint."

Once the Polar Prince is sold, the company will have just one ship left -- the Trans Gulf, which transports freight between Lewisporte, Nfld., and Labrador coastal communities.

"In the past couple of years, my dad's sold off three or four ships."

Burry says his father, Austin, has decided to retire.

"Anyone that worked all their life should have a point and a time in their life that they should be enjoying life."

Link takes victims to real eBay sign-in page, then hidden characters redirect to scam site.

A flaw has been discovered on eBay's Web site that would have allowed fraudsters to successfully redirect the sign-on process to a phishing site.
 
Reported by British antiphishing outfit Netcraft, the clever scam apparently started with fraudsters sending e-mails asking eBay users to update their accounts. So far so normal, as such fake eBay e-mails are currently one of the phishing world's persistent lines of attack.

Disarmingly, however, the link provided was genuine and led to the correct eBay sign-in page, signin.ebay.com. If users clicked on the link, parameters embedded in the otherwise normal stream of characters at the end of the link actually redirected users away from the page after the sign-in page to a fake phishing page, via an open relay hosted at servlet.ebay.com.

The end result would have been that users gave away information allowing phishers to hijack their accounts, either as a way of laundering money or for launching fake auctions.

According to Netcraft's Paul Mutton, the company first learned of the attack from users of its antiphishing toolbar--which stops the attack--and reported the flaw to eBay last week.

Subtle Con
This is not the first time such an attack has been attempted on eBay users. In March, phishers launched an almost identical redirect-style attack, which spoofed the sign-on page itself. Mutton said he considered the latest attack more subtle as it manipulated the real sign-on page, and would therefore be harder for users to detect.

"I believe this new exploit is more serious because it is more convincing," Mutton said. "It is something they can prevent by enforcing stricter coding conventions." At the time of going to press, eBay was unavailable for comment.

The moral is not to click on links in e-mails just because they look genuine, a fairly disturbing conclusion as this is one of the main criteria people use. Netcraft's toolbar, a Web browser plug-in for Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox, is designed to protect against phishing websites, not least by analyzing the sort of characters used in this attack.

US on-line auction company eBay Inc has started construction of a 200 mln usd Chinese headquarters in Shanghai's Pudong district, the Shanghai Daily reported citing a company statement.

The 30,000 square meter facility will be completed in 2007 and will be eBay's largest non-US operation, the paper said.

The company last month launched its PayPal payment service in China. Earlier this year eBay president Meg Whitman said that the company planned to invest 100 mln usd in China this year.

The King is dead. Or is he?

Disputes over Elvis Presley's cultural significance rage on, but one matter is not up for discussion: The enduring material value of the entertainer's legacy.

Gene Epstein of Wrightstown, Pa., has filed a lawsuit against a man who allegedly reneged on an eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ) bid for a 1969 Mercedes-Benz that was once owned by the rockabilly-country-gospel balladeer. According to a report from The Associated Press, Epstein's suit claims that Jason Shepherd of Ballston Lake, N.Y., entered a "Buy It Now" bid of $245,000 for the posh limo.

But the suit maintains that when it came time to pay, Shepherd claimed that the bid was erroneous—the result of his daughter accidentally striking a key on his computer. The lawsuit is seeking for Shepherd to pay the original bid, along with $150,000 in damages. The suit justified its raison d'etre by saying, "Once an item is removed from the active sale list on eBay and listed as sold, its reappearance on the active auction listings creates the impression that the item being sold is in some way unsaleable or unmarketable," according to the AP report.

Epstein said, however, that he would settle the case if Shepherd issues a specifically worded apology he drew up—and pays an unspecified "token" amount. The AP says that attempts to reach Shepherd and representatives from eBay for comments were unsuccessful.

ADAM Ginsberg made his fortune selling pool tables on eBay. In three years he went from running a small retail outlet in a suburban American shopping mall, to running his entire business on eBay and with his total sales exceeding $US20 million (A$26 million).

"eBay is without question the greatest home business opportunity in business history but there are pitfalls for the unwary," says Ginsberg. "Even as an experienced trader I have slipped up and paid the price of bad feedback and unhappy customers despite my best intentions.

"The eBay community keeps you on your toes."

Ginsberg's tips for successful trading on eBay include:

1. Offer great customer service. eBay's self-regulating community will ensure you get a bad rating if you deliver bad service.

2. Provide good descriptions and quality photos. eBay buyers can't handle the merchandise prior to purchase, so they rely entirely on your written description and photographs. The better your images and descriptions, the more likely you are to make sales, so always look professional.

3. Operate as a legitimate business to build a viable asset and be eligible for tax deductions. It also helps to implement systems that automate your daily operations and allow you to focus on building your business.

4. Fully brief yourself on eBay policies. You will be reported by other eBay users and your auctions closed down for any number of violations so don't find out the hard way – familiarise yourself with all the rules.

5. Don't attempt to circumvent the fee protocol. The most frequently committed offence on eBay is fee circumvention whereby customers are provided with the opportunity to purchase outside of eBay.

Ginsberg will be in Brisbane (August 9), Melbourne (August 11) and Sydney (August 16) for a seminar titled How to Buy, Sell and Profit on eBay.

Online auction site eBay.com.au is for the prude, claims the founder of Sexybay.com.au, a new online enterprise dubbed "Australia's sexiest auction site".

"As long as it is legal, anything goes," said Michael Lambert, who launched Sexybay at the Sexpo show in Sydney over the weekend.

Items that have already appeared for listing included a breast model of Ms Nude Australia, Arianna Starr; 1970s porn magazines and a solid jarrah spanking table.

In contrast, eBay.com.au does not sell X-rated or mature audience items.

Lambert co-founded the company with Susanne Choppin, also known as "Susie Bodybitz", towards the end of last year, after Choppin unsuccessfully tried to sell a body clock on eBay.com.au because it too closely resembled female body parts.

"Unfortunately, it was an item that only sells with an image," he said.

Choppin's main business aside from Sexybay is Bodybitz, which is a provider of seaweed-based sculpture kits used to "immortalise your naughty bitz".

Sexybay is also a standard auction site. It sells non-adult material such as electronics, gadgets, furniture and jewellery. Users enter the site's adults-only area via a splash page with a disclaimer saying they must be over 18 years.

"If you don't like adult stuff just don't go to the adult categories," Lambert said.

Sellers have the option of selecting an auction that lasts one, three, five, seven or 14 days. Listing is free and users pay a 2.5 per cent commission of the sale price if it is less than $50, and 0.5 per cent if the sale price exceeds $500. Attention-getters such as bolding and front-page listings cost extra.

"We have chosen to go for turnover," Lambert said. "We want to give people value for money."

The launch at Sexpo, in Sydney, was a success from day-one. Lambert said he had doubled subscribers after the first day of the show - a four-day event "looking at all aspects of health, sexuality, and adult lifestyles.

It may not all be all smooth sailing for the online entrepreneur, however. Lambert has invested over $30,000 in the site and admitted: "If we are not profitable by the end of the year I am going to be up the creek without a paddle."

eBay.com.au declined to comment on Sexybay.

The founders of Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo Inc., eBay Inc. and Netscape Communications Corp. each had a vision of what could be done with the Internet, but none knew in those early days the true size of the revolution they had sparked.

David Filo and Jerry Yang, for example, two PhD candidates in electrical engineering at Stanford University, started a guide to their favourite links on the Internet in a campus trailer. A few months later, when 100,000 people visited the guide in a single day, they knew they had a business opportunity they couldn't ignore. They abandoned their electrical engineering studies for a round of venture capital funding. Today, Yahoo serves more than 345 million individuals around the world every month.

Some of these young companies are now household names and part of the foundations of the 21st century economy. On-line sales in Canada hit $28.3-billion last year. In the United States, they reached $141-billion (U.S.), or 6.5 per cent of all retail sales. By 2010, the on-line channel will account for 13 per cent of total U.S. retail sales, or $331-billion, according to Forrester Research.

In the five years between Netscape's public offering and the peak of the Nasdaq Stock Market in March, 2000, more than 800 startups went public, most with connections to the Internet, raising almost $50-billion.

The differentiating factors between success and failure in the first decade of e-commerce are still not entirely clear, even as the Internet economy moves into its next phase of rapid change and development. But survivors of the early generation point to some common winning traits, including using the new technology to improve the way they interact with customers, manage costs and respond to changes in the marketplace.

One of the ideas that fascinated eBay founder Pierre Omidyar was creating trust between users thousands of miles apart, who would never meet face to face. An early creation at eBay that helped distinguish it from other on-line trading companies was an electronic feedback forum where buyers and sellers could establish reputations. The concept has become one of the cornerstones of the eBay trading community, which today numbers 157 million people around the world.

Similar communication channels play a key role in formulating the company's strategy. EBay established a system of message boards to which users send their ideas for improving the trading community. Employees pore over thousands of messages each day and use customer resource management software to help sort the ideas into categories that eventually form the basis of the company's product planning sessions each quarter.

“In some respect, we are a communications company,” says Jordan Banks, managing director of eBay Canada, a five-year-old subsidiary of San Jose, Calif.-based eBay Inc. “Since day one, the customer has been the guiding voice. We gave them the avenue and forums to communicate. It means that we don't have to hope what we introduce will be well adopted.”

Some of eBay's most recent initiatives include the $620-million purchase of Shopping.com, a comparison shopping service, and the introduction of Prostores, a program under which eBay runs customized e-commerce storefronts for merchants so they can sell their products outside the eBay marketplace.

“There really was no way to predict where the successful strands would come in the e-world,” says John Challenger, of Challenger Gray & Christmas, Inc., an outplacement consultancy based in Chicago that works with executives in the industry. “If you take a company like Yahoo, they got there early, with a lot of money, and were able to go out and hire the very best people.”

The winners also bet on the right kind of business models. Amazon.com, for example, still gets about 70 per cent of its revenue from selling books, movies and music. The formula has proven successful because it matches low-cost shipping with items that have high value for customers, says David Pecaut, a senior vice-president with Boston Consulting Group in Toronto.

Amazon says its model also benefits from a quick turnover of inventory, which means the company usually manages to collect money owed from customers before its payments to suppliers come due.

The successful Internet businesses figured out how to use the technology to improve customer care. They also realized the importance of getting market share early. Pay Pal Inc., for instance, which enables transactions on-line, was criticized for “buying customers” when it offered them $10 to open an account. But the strategy worked, and the company built up such a large account base in such a short period of time, that no one was able to catch up, Mr. Pecaut says. (eBay purchased PayPal in July, 2002, for $1.4-billion in stock).

Some of the hottest Internet companies have proved to be the sites that enable e-commerce. Yahoo, and its younger rival Google Inc., have built lucrative businesses helping people navigate the Web and selling advertising on the results pages. In the early days of the Web, banner ads were the mainstay. Today, the excitement is around search-engine marketing.

With search-engine marketing, merchants buy keywords such as “big-screen television.” When a visitor to a search site types in the words, links to the merchant's website appear in ads next to the regular results. One of the reasons advertisers love this method is that once they have bought their keywords, they only pay the search company again when someone clicks through on their link.

On-line stores now direct most of their marketing budgets to the search engine community, which is dominated by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Search. Search engines deliver on-line merchants 43 per cent of all new customers, according to Shop.org, an association for e-retailers.

The effectiveness of this kind of advertising drove the average on-line advertising budget up 18 per cent in 2004 to $4.6-million, from $3.9-million in 2003, a survey by Forrester Research for the group found.

Dell Inc., the world's largest computer manufacturer, has been an enormous enabler and benefactor of the e-commerce revolution. Its direct-order model has helped commoditize the market, where the average price of a PC has fallen by nearly 50 per cent since 1999, even as the speed of the devices has risen almost 20-fold.

Unlike the Internet startups, Dell had a traditional business model in place when e-commerce emerged. But it embraced the technology as a means to connect more efficiently with its customers.

“We had a head start with a business model that was already established and really fit the new business environment,” says Michael Lombardo, general manager of home and small business for Dell Canada.

The Web gives the company an almost instantaneous read on which initiatives work with customers and which don't, he says.

Dell claims to be the first company to have scored on-line sales of $1-million a day, hitting the target in 1997, three years after taking its direct-order business to the Web. Today, the company says it receives more than 15,000 orders and information requests every minute from its 81 country websites. More than half of its $49.2-billion in annual sales are enabled by the Web, Mr. Lombardo says.

Even for the Internet companies that have created a winning formula, mastering the new technology to build sales has proven a lot more difficult than some idealistic entrepreneurs may have realized.

There is only one pure-play e-commerce company on the Fortune 500 today. Amazon.com, with sales of $6.9-billion, ranks No. 303, a few notches below Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom Inc., but above Barnes & Noble Inc.

As recently as a few years ago, it was questionable whether Amazon would survive, as it staggered under about $2-billion of debt. The company did eventually reach profitability, but it took more than eight years, and management is still wrestling with growth issues.