Twenty Two Years on eBay

 

The first guitar I found on eBay... I just didn't buy it on eBay!

When does a phenomenon enter the realm of nostalgia? I’d say it happens the moment you realise it’s been a long time since you first encountered it and take a moment to look back on your first experience. That has just happened to me with eBay: I received an email from them this morning thanking me for being a customer for the past 22 years: I signed up on 26 April, 2002.

At the time I joined, eBay was a relative newcomer here in Britain. It all got started back in 1995 when a computer programmer named Pierre Omidyar set up the site AuctionWeb as a means of earning extra money. The first item sold was a broken laser pointer. After the company had become successful, a PR story went out claiming that the site had been set up in order to help Omidyar’s fiancée sell Pex candy dispensers, but this was a fabrication intended to create a warm, human interest vibe.

I’d heard about eBay from a couple of people. A friend told me that he and some colleagues had set up a syndicate to buy items and sell them on for profit. Apparently, you could find almost anything on there. My curiosity piqued, I decided to take a look. Ebay.co.uk had only been going for three years at this time. There was no Paypal: money changed hands usually in the form of cheques – a real sign of how far we've come since then. It wasn’t quite the Wild West, but most of the safeguards that are now in place to prevent fraud were not operative at this time. I wanted to test the service to see if it worked. I think my first, experimental purchase was a copy of an old Giles annual which cost only a few pounds. What with having to send off a cheque which the vendor then had to get cashed and cleared, it took something in the order of seven to ten days before the item showed up. But I’d proved a point. You could buy things on here without being ripped off. I next took a punt on a whole box of Giles annuals, listed as a job lot, thinking I could knock them out individually and turn a profit. As of a few weeks ago, they were still in my garage.

What I really wanted to know was whether I could use this new sales platform as a means to buy guitars. At around this time, I’d taken a chance and bought an electric guitar from a strange, British-based website called something like ‘Great Finds’ and based in East Anglia. The guitar didn’t cost very much, so it was a relatively low risk, and it turned up looking exactly as I’d expected. I now started to use eBay’s search facilities to hunt out guitars, but I was still a bit cautious of committing to a purchase. There was no means of getting your money back in the event of a scam. I found a guitar I was interested in, at what seemed like a reasonable price: £1400. It was still a lot more than I was prepared to risk in an online auction, but it ended with no bids. I then emailed the seller to ask if he was prepared to sell the guitar to me, privately, for the starting bid and he agreed. This was, then, technically the first guitar I’d found using eBay, though I’d broken the rules in asking the seller to deal with me offline. There were, however, no comebacks.

It took another two years before I finally bought a guitar by placing a bid on it. The start price was £240 and there were no other bidders. It was a 12-string Framus ‘Hootenanny’ guitar like the one formerly owned by John Lennon that has just come to light, but I wanted it for its association with The Kinks, who had used the same model on their 1965 single ‘See My Friends’. The guitar arrived with no problems: the seller even threw in a replacement set of strings.

Over the years, I have bought a total of 33 guitars on ebay, including a couple of instances like the first where the deal was done offline. It proved to be a good way of hunting out obscure models that were hard to find in dealers. In one instance, I had a particular model on watch which I let go without bidding. Fifteen years later, it ended up in my hands, identifiable from its highly figured wood grain.

It wasn’t all about guitars. I realised that eBay provided a chance to try and acquire some lost items from childhood – books and old toys. A favourite book of mine around the age of four was a ‘Little Golden’ book of Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon series Top Cat. I still owned my original copy but it had long since lost its covers and a couple of pages. There weren’t any examples to be found here in Britain, but I located one in America. I can’t remember what it cost including postage and customs duty, but it wasn’t very much. This was my first transatlantic purchase. Emboldened by the experience, I steeled myself to buy a guitar from across the pond.

I’d discovered a few American sellers who looked legitimate – all of them were bona fide dealers who had their own websites, and their photos were consistently shot against the same background (an easy way of spotting fraudulent listings is when the seller’s other items are shot against wildly divergent settings). One such dealer was based in Carbondale Illinois, and specialised in some of the wilder vintage models that interested me. The guitar I chose cost me £300 plus shipping plus tax, although these didn’t bump up the price by more than about £50. It took a week or so to arrive, but it turned up in February 2004. Later the same year, I bought two more guitars from the same seller.

In all those twenty two years, I’ve probably spent a fair few thousand pounds one way and another – I haven’t kept score, but it must be up around £10,000 by now, if not higher (one guitar alone cost £3,000). And out of all those items, there has been only one dud, a Dubreq Stylophone that was not as described. I’d like to report that the seller accepted it back with good grace but he proved to be a right handful. Pathetic as it sounds, he refused to accept the item off the postman when I returned it because it might give him Covid (this was March 2020). Somehow it all got resolved, but I ended up with a piece of useless junk which, like those Giles annuals, is still tucked away in the garage.

So much for buying, but what about the experience of selling? When I first signed up, I thought this might be a handy source of extra income (I was still freelancing at the time). The first guitar was intended to be a ‘sell on for profit’ item, likewise several others I’d acquired through other sources. Somehow, this never happened. When, many years later, I did set about selling stuff, it was a decidedly mixed experience. During a house move, I was trying to get rid of a fairly crappy electric piano that had once belonged to a relatively well known comedian (though not so well known that I can remember his name). I started it at a giveaway price but specified UK bidders only and, more to the point, collection only. The thing weighed a ton. It was won by a bidder from Italy. I cancelled his bid and offered it to the next one down the line, who fortunately was able to come and pick it up. But it all struck me as a lot of rigmarole just to end up with fifty quid. I had a similar experience trying to sell a Fender Twin Reverb amplifier. This is a substantial item, very heavy, and needs to be shipped in a flight case, which it didn’t have. Once again, the listing made it very clear that this was a collect only item. I lost count of the number of messages I had from people asking if I would ship it or if they could arrange a courier (impossible, with no shipping carton). I had better luck with some old copies of the TV and Radio Times, which were collected by a local buyer who happened to be an academic doing research into television and film. But on the whole, I decided that selling wasn’t for me.

In the course of writing this piece, I was curious to see how eBay would have appeared when I first signed in 22 years ago. The answer came courtesy of the Wayback Machine and the screenshot below (captured on 23 May, 2002) shows us the extent to which the online experience has evolved. Ebay in 2002 was a pretty primitive user interface, lacking design elements, and constructed from very basic coding. For all that, it still did what it set out to do and as can be seen from the links at the bottom of the page, had clearly defined rules designed to safeguard users: although before the era of Paypal, one simply had to take the risk when mailing cash or cheques to people you’d never met.

One may ask whether having eBay around has changed the way we do business. For many people, I’m sure it introduced and indeed normalised the idea of online sales and purchases, e-commerce being still a relatively new phenomenon when the platform emerged. For collectors, it opened up a worldwide marketplace: formerly rare items were suddenly much easier to obtain, and this will have had a corrseponding effect on values. ‘Real world’ retailers have had to play catch-up, especially in the field of books and comics where dealers who could once content themselves with working out of dusty old shops now must maintain an online presence if they want to do business.

A glance through Wikipedia’s summary of the company’s history reads not unlike a synopsis for a series of Succession: acquisition after acquisition (including the British Gumtree platform). Next year will mark the company’s thirtieth anniversary and I think it’s safe to say that eBay will continue to be with us for the forseeable and, indeed, the unforseeable future. And all because a computer programmer wanted to earn a bit of extra money...