I’ve never twittered and never sold or bought on eBay. To me the technology and the hassle of the latter are daunting. I came across a franchise chain, iSold It, which solves the fact that I’m eBay-challenged.
Drop off your item at an iSold It store and they handle auctioning it on eBay and sending it to the lucky buyer. They take a cut of the proceeds and send you a check for the rest.
It’s not worth it for a low-value piece of, to quote Weird Al Yankovic, “the kind of stuff you’d throw away,” but worthwhile for a higher-value item. EBay is a business made possible by the internet, and iSold It is a business made possible by eBay. Technological change generates cascades of related businesses and creates jobs and services previously unimagined. How many other examples are there of a new technology that generates a new business than in turn creates yet another type of new business that feeds into it?
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What about search engines and search-optimizing services that tweak your website so it appears in the first page of results?
I hate to burst everyone’s bubble, but that type of business was around even before The 40 Year Old Virgin. Early examples go back to the late 90′s. In fact, during the 2001/2002 bubble burst, I personally knew of two people who started such businesses. They were often combined with a Mail Box/Shipping type operation. Most of them disappeared as times became less bad (I work in the telecom world…I have yet to see times get as good as 1995!). Some are still around, but I think the competition from traditional garage sales, and from distressed merchandise sellers drove most of them out of business.
What about the Yellow Pages (and similar), especially from an advertising perspective?
The increased proliferation of the telephone drove the increase of city directories into massive phone books. These businesses, in turn, created an outlet for advertising and customer outreach that didn’t exist before. The idea of a “pay for premium listing” business wouldn’t have existed without the technology of the telephone.
Big tech companies have been opening up their doors to the little guys. Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android platform, and Facebook applications have been big in the news for giving software developers huge new audiences.
And smaller tech companies have been following suit. A company called Atlassian allows developers to write plug-ins for their popular software bug tracking system and wiki. While most are free, some 3rd party companies choose to create pay for versions.
The company I work for now (a small division of Comcast), is creating a platform for interactive television. The applications will most likely be written by small software development firms willing to learn a new medium.
These are just a handful of examples. Hopefully, all these emerging software mediums will give the tech community an entrepreneurial boost in these tough times.
When Diamond Rio put out the mp3 player, it led to Apple getting in the game and making the iPod, which in turn led to the iPhone, iTunes (and Amazon’s even better mp3 store), and various accessories for mp3 players (noise-reducing earbuds, etc.)
Copyright Law firms <- MPAA / RIAA <- Digital “piracy” <- the internet.
Except really what this is an advantage of is how big industry can resist technology by lobbying (DMCA) along with legal force in the industry.
i.e. the technology has created an opportunity for business but it hasn’t been embraced
We run a successful shop in Austin, Texas called The Sellery. Part of why we are still around is because we keep track of as many drop off shops in town and around the country that succeed and fail. It helps knowing what works and what doesn’t. As for doing it yourself, most of our clients don’t have the time to learn how and then to list and ship everything.
For it to be really profitable though you have to streamline as much of the work as possible.
We are working on a machine where you can just insert your item in one end and when it comes out the other it will be listed on eBay.
Like 3:47, sorry to burst your bubble but Trendwatching covered this a couple of years ago and named it Feeder Businesses. Some of the examples they point to are companies that write or edit online profiles on dating sites, and of course Sold It On Ebay -type stores. Here’s the full briefing: http://trendwatching.com/trends/FEEDER_BUSINESSES.htm