Patting Myself on the Back: Feedback #10,000 on eBay

I’d expected feedback #10,000 on eBay to occur right about the time of my 10 year anniversary on the site, but I beat that estimate by a good 7 months. So after nearly 9-1/2 years on the site my star finally shoots. I remember back when my 999 flipped over to 1,000 thinking I’d never see a shooting star, but here I am. I guess at this pace I’ll have to live another 80-90 years to crack the 100,000 club, but then again, who knows, things happen, business models change.

After all, if eBay hadn’t made changes in how feedback was calculated then my 10 year anniversary very likely would have come first. If I recall correctly I believe I got bumped up from about a 6,500 count to around 8,000 overnight when that happened.

I got to 10,000 selling unique collectible items the entire time. Every listing a new one. Will that continue? Likely, because that’s where my heart is, but who knows. Never say never.

Did I ever tell you about how I got my start on eBay in 2000? Actually the seed was planted as early as 1998. I was in college (I’m not that young, I just didn’t start til I was 25) and pretty much piss-poor all the time. Not only did I not have a computer, I’d yet to even enter the electronic age–I’d drop classes if there was any kind of computer requirement, wanted nothing to do with it. Anyway, I was at my Uncle’s for Christmas, or one holiday or another, this is the same fellow who got me doing card shows back in the 80′s and he showed me this thing called eBay.

In about two minutes while I was standing there he listed an item–imagine that now. No picture, just his standard terms copied in along with a repetition of the title in the body of the listing, all done. Then he showed me his My eBay page and all the bids he had … on crap! Absolute garbage was being bid up 5-10 times higher than we used to get at the live auctions. “Collectibles” he’d bought in such bulk that he’d been selling them for years. A little saliva dripped down the corner of my mouth. I was sold.

Fast forward to December 1999, I graduated from school and started sending out the resumes. I trudged from one end of Manhattan to another several times a week, and this Long Island boy had about as much of a clue about New York City at that time as I did computers. Finally, after a few months of seeking employment as an editorial assistant I did land work at a magazine … in advertising sales. I really clicked with the woman who was to be my boss, we were to be a small two person department, and, oh yeah, she’d be headed off for a 2-week vacation the day I started. Huh? “Just let them sell themselves the ads til I come back,” she told me. Okay.

I love my old boss, but she knows as well as I that I completely BSed her about my computer experience. The first time I was at a computer for any more than a ten minute gap of space was my first day on the job. When did I start? That’s easily enough discovered, it says I registered my things-and-other-stuff eBay account on April 10, 2000, that’s the day I started work.

By the time my boss had returned from her vacation I’d learned about snipers, sold some ads, ordered my own computer online from Gateway, had a drawerful of used books from an antique shop I’d discovered around the corner from the office, made my first sale on eBay, packed my first order from my desk, purchased several money orders to mail out payments to eBay sellers, registered with PayPal…or maybe it was BillPoint…or both perhaps, garnered my first star, a yellow one I guess, and more. Hooked, totally hooked!

Before I left that job in 2004 I’d reached the point where eBay was paying me as much as my paycheck, but I was doing well more than double-duty to earn it, sleeping about 2 hours continuously at night and an hour each way on the Long Island Railroad every morning and afternoon. I was exhausted! I’d had at least two opportunities to go back to the cubicle over the intervening years, I passed each time, and though I did offer to help out in a pinch once nothing came of it.

While 10,000 looked impossible from even 1,000, and that 100k still looks unobtainable, I do have to say, I wonder what I’ll be up to and how business will be when I grab feedback #20,000.