Turning to the electronic marketplace (11/23/05)

It’s not your ordinary bicycle shop.

Oh, to be sure, there are plenty of bicycles to be found, along with some mopeds.

But look around and you’ll find half a dozen antique blow-torches, half a bushel basket’s worth of costume jewelry, birdhouses, 19th century kitchen chairs, and a pair of African fertility figures that reportedly once stood outside the hut of a witch doctor.

“I just sold a snowmobile to a guy in Kansas and a cuckoo clock to a guy in Nebraska,” said Tim Miller, owner of TJ’s Bicycle and Moped Sales and Service in downtown Portland.

Miller has recently expanded into the building adjacent to his bike shop to launch TJ’s Auction and Packaging, an eBay-related business aimed at helping folks get rid of unwanted items via the Internet while making a few bucks at the same time.

At first, he said, his goal was to simply sell off some of his enormous collection of old bikes and related items.

“I’ve collected so much stuff,” he said. There’s at least one barn-full and a semi trailer load.

He turned to eBay — the popular Internet auction site — to get rid of it. Then he figured he might as well offer the same service to the public while selling off his collection.

“And I figured, if I’m eBaying it, I might as well package it, and if I’m packaging it I might as well ship it,” he said. The store is now a UPS center for shipping.

“We’ve sold numerous items already,” said Miller, who has been working with webmaster Derek Manson, who works at Ivy Tech.

Miller thinks the potential for the business — which he likens to an Internet flea market rather than a traditional auction — is huge.

“I’ve really got high expectations for this,” he said.

Portland banker Jeff Miller, who has dabbled as an eBay buyer and seller for years, thinks Miller is onto something.

The eBay site, Miller said, vastly expands and changes the nature of the marketplace, particularly for collectibles and hard-to-find items.

“I started out as a buyer,” Miller said. “Mainly I was looking for Redkey fruit jars and Albany glass.” Both items can be hard to find if you limit your search to local flea markets, antique stores, garage sales, and auctions. But both are plentiful on the Internet.

Miller said he used to find one or two Redkey fruit jars per year. But he has accumulated a couple of hundred of them since turning to eBay.

“At that point,” said Miller with a laugh, “I was pretty much an addict.”

But, he added, the addiction was to the eBay marketplace experience itself.

“Once I started selling, I quit buying,” Miller said. “And it started working out a whole lot better for me.”

Miller has sold a number of cars for people via the Internet, particularly unusual models

Miller said his approach will be to take virtually anything someone brings in. For a commission, which includes a flat fee whether the items sells or not, TJ’s will take digital photographs of the item, write copy describing the item, post the photos and information on eBay, handle e-mailed inquiries, and take care of the shipping if the item sells.

“It takes a good eBayer,” said Miller. “There’s a lot of work to this.”

The payoff, said Miller, is that things sold via eBay sometimes attract a much wider audience of potential buyers because of the Internet’s international reach.

“I sold a fountain pen to Bud Yorkin, the Hollywood producer,” said Miller. “He paid $750 for it. I thought it was worth $10.”

But his favorite unexpected jackpot was a pair of CDs by the Seattle grunge-rock group Nirvana. Miller had no idea what sort of interest the CDs would bring when he posted them on eBay.

To his surprise, the site started registering a “hit” a minute and stayed at that level of activity around the clock.

In the end, the two CDs sold to someone in Germany. The price? $850. “It opens up the market worldwide,” said Miller.[[In-content Ad]]