Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about selling on eBay in the 1990s.
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Selling On eBay In The ‘90s
Rob: What's up, Pro Flippers? On today's episode, we are talking about selling on eBay in the 90s.
Rob: All right, guys, so today is a fun episode. We always have fun here, but today we're talking about selling on eBay back in the 90s.
Melissa: Yeah, this all came from a comment that we got on a video the other day, which it was just so funny to me. It was a comment. Somebody said they had been selling since 2008.
And, you know, that's awesome that they've been doing it. And I replied back as, as you saying, you know, I've been doing this since 96. And it's It's a blast. It's so fun. You know, like camaraderie or whatever, going back and forth. And then they replied back, 96, we didn't even have phones or computers in 96.
And I didn't take it as like them personally, but maybe that's what, how they meant to them personally. They didn't have it. But I was like, there's definitely phones and computers in 96 because eBay came out in 95. So then we started reminiscing about how eBay used to be like, and that's how this episode was born.
Rob: Absolutely. So if you were around and you were selling in the nineties, maybe you remember some of this stuff, but if you were not, that's okay. We'll tell you guys how much nicer it is selling nowadays than it was back in the nineties, so it was pretty cool, being able to do it in the nineties, but we did not have the luxuries of a smartphone with us.
We didn't have, the luxuries of being able to have a payment processor online, stuff like that. That was just, we take for granted now and what we're doing with our selling business, on a lot of apps, not just eBay, but a lot of apps that were able to do stuff and be able to reach a lot more people.
So it's really, really cool comparing what we did in the nineties versus what it is now.
Melissa: So take us back to creating a sale. Okay. So, well, first of all, how did you even start? Like knowing about eBay and selling on eBay?
Rob: My mom so I don't even know where she picked it up from but she was the one who got us started and she actually started selling baby clothes. My mom liked collecting baby dolls and baby clothes and she started selling that. And that's where we started to branch out and go further than that.
Melissa: Prior to eBay, she was in the classified she would post in the classifieds, right?
She'd buy at yard sales and post in the classifieds and then eBay came out and I mean it started in 95. She got on there in 96, right around the same time. And then you were 16 and started at the same time or started with her because you loved it. Did any of your sisters do it?
Rob: No, I don't think so. I was the only one who really got attached to it, doing it with my mom and it was a kind of like a self employed. You didn't have to, you could make money just by doing your own time and what you wanted to do. So, and what was the first things you started with? Was it the Nordic tracks? Nordic tracks. Yeah. So I would help my mom a little bit with that.
But then I I think possibly we branched into, car seats, strollers, stuff that we could, fit into boxes that weren't huge. And when I say strollers, it wasn't like the strollers that we've sold recently. Well, within the last couple of years, it was more like umbrella strollers, smaller stuff. And it wasn't high, high profit stuff, but it was stuff that we were making money on in the baby arena of the yeah, reselling world.
Melissa: How did you even think about selling a NordicTrack on eBay?
Rob: I'm just going to, so some of you guys might have known the story, going to our local Salvation Army auction, needing to make some money to buy a car, but going to the local Salvation Army auction with my mom, and then seeing that thing, you know, the, the biggest thing, and we're, which we're still attracted to, you know, finding undervalued items. And for me to see this piece of exercise equipment for five bucks, it's gotta be worth more than five bucks.
Melissa: And that's how you had to check because you couldn't check your phone. There was no smartphone. So you're just like, it has to be worth more than five bucks. I'm gonna, I'm not gonna lose money on this.
Right?
Rob: Yep. So, we got it. We paid $5 for it, ended up selling it, within seven days for, I think it was $350 that we actually sold it for. And then that was hooked.
Melissa: So then that started your search at 16 years old, a $350 sale. Like that is pretty cool. And you worked at Red Lobster at the same time.
Rob: It would have taken me over two weeks to do that same amount of money or even less money than that in one single sale. And then we had to figure out how to box it up and get it shipped out and all that kind of stuff. But you just learned as you went, which was cool. And I still remember, boxes back then. So in Orlando, there was a store called boxes, etcetera. And we, we found them. I don't remember how we found them.
Somebody told us about them, but that's where we got all of the
Melissa: phone book, maybe?
Rob: It might've been, they might've been in the phone book. But it was one of those things. That's where we got all of our boxing materials. We got it. They had it. Tons and tons they were more of you had to have an account with them to be able to buy from them but you, they sold more to businesses to be able to ship boxes. And this is before stuff, I feel like in the 90s stuff wasn't coming as plentiful in from China, that kind of stuff. So this was an actual store that manufactured boxes and they had pages of boxes different size of boxes. So whenever we sold something we went to our reference guide of all the different sizes of boxes, we'd find out what size box we went, we'd drive over to the store, get boxes, we'd buy huge bags of bubble wrap and packaging peanuts, that would last us for a long time, but that store sold it for really, really cheap, and that's how we did it back in the day.
Melissa: So walk us through how you're, so say you're at the Salvation Army auction, you go and buy this thing for $5, walk us through the listing process back in 96, when you started.
Rob: So I remember back in the day and we had a this is when the camera, I think it was called, Mavica, before we, well, before we got that Mavica camera, it had a floppy disk, so it was a three and a half inch, three and a half, inch, I think it was, a floppy, they called it floppy, but there was one disk before it that I remember that was a taller, a bigger one.
Yeah, the five inch, but that one you could actually bend the three one that I remember that we had a camera for, I think it was a three and a half inch disc. Yeah, it was called a floppy also, but it wasn't a floppy. So, I remember that, that's what I remember the most is being able to use that camera, take pictures, and it was an expensive camera.
It wasn't cheap, that my mom actually bought. We bought it, for the business, and I was able to take pictures on that. We put that into the computer, and then you had to upload. So, this was before eBay had picture hosting or anything like that. You had a small spot where you had a title and then you had a description.
And then you had to actually have a hosting, which ours was, and you guys remember it was called boom speed was the name of the hosting and you could get a free account with them to host so much. I don't remember what the megabytes was our how many, the, the storage amount that you were able to do, but it was really, really cool.
So you put your disk in the computer, you uploaded it to BoomSpeed, which is online, online hosting, and then for your listing on eBay, it was, I guess this might have been type of coding. It was, yeah. I mean, I don't know, but you had to do this thing where you had to type in IMG, equals SRC and you copy and paste your thing and you put it in quotations or a little fish thing.
So I, I still remember doing that, but that was the only way you could get pictures on eBay, was coding them from the hosting website over to eBay and they had an htm, it's called html, that you actually typed it in and that's how you got your pictures over. And then once you hit submit, the pictures popped up and they were right underneath the description and you could see all the pictures right underneath it, so.
Melissa: Did it take a long time for, like, them to upload? Like a day? Like, did they have to approve it or? Well, no. They let everything sell back then, right?
Rob: You could do anything you wanted. You could put any pictures on there. They had no control over that stuff. So, I mean, somebody could have probably flagged it back in the day if somebody flagged something that you did.
But that's, that's how it was. That was the system. And I'm trying to remember if we did it before. I don't remember that well. Some people say that you used to have to scan pictures in to do it. As far back as I can remember, I don't remember scanning. I remember having that camera with the floppy disk in it.
After that, they went to a mini DVD camera, that you could put a DVD into it. It was a mini DVD, so it was small.
Melissa: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rob: But it's just a different type of way to save the pictures on it. So, but we had that floppy, that floppy card, you put it in there and it would only hold so many pictures on that floppy.
Put it into your computer, upload it to, BoomSpeed, which was online, and then you had to do HTML to actually get the, pictures on there. So, very complicated process compared to what we do now. Smartphone take a picture upload it. I mean, it's right there on eBay. So totally totally different nowadays and what we had to deal with back in the day.
Melissa: You were telling me there was a way maybe not in the beginning. But there was a way to go to your car and look up an item.
Rob: So I still remember this and you guys, some of you guys might remember this.
I'm old school when it comes back to this to some of you guys and I might be young to some of you guys. It's crazy. So I remember when they came out with a card that I could put into my IBM ThinkPad laptop. We had some really cool stuff when I was a kid.
Melissa: We lived, we did.
Rob: We lived in a, a wealthier area and we would go to yard sales on the weekends and these people that had and we I didn't grow up with a lot of money.
I grew up with a big family So, but these people around us that were in these wealthy neighborhoods would would have all the newest in the high end stuff, and that's where I got this think pad from. It was a ibm think pad from a yard sale. But anyways, I had that and then I remember when voice stream some of you guys might remember t mobile back before it was t mobile Or they bought out a company called voice stream.
We had a card that I could, I could put into the side of my laptop, had a little antenna that popped up on it and it was like a cell phone, but it's still dial up. It was dial up internet, but it had a way to connect to a, the internet and you could actually look from your laptop onto eBay and you could do the research super slow compared to anything you can think of on your phone now or your laptop.
But it was super, super slow. It took a long time to do it, but you could do it. I could sit at an auction. I could go and do the inspection on the auction, find something that I was interested in, come back and sit in my car and just sit there and type it and do the research on it so I did not have to gamble anymore.
That was a game changer. Do you remember what year that was? I don't. I was trying to remember it was definitely it was either late 90s or early 2000s when we actually had that, the capabilities of doing that. And it was back when voice stream, that was the cell phone company that we had at the time, but they were the one to offer the card and you could just stick it in the side of the computer with a little, And you could be able to get online with that.
So it was pretty cool.
Melissa: That probably was a game changer then. Totally was. Because you didn't have to, and now you can just look it up and you see people looking it up all the time. One of the other game changers is payment processors. I was going to dive into that. I was going to say, so now you've got your listing up, and eBay's growing at a rapid pace at this time and people are getting to know about it.
Like I had heard, before I met you, I knew about eBay but I did not know that you could actually sell stuff and make money. Like, I knew people bought stuff. I had never bought anything anyway. But, it was growing at a pretty rapid pace and people, like, saw it and saw it as a marketplace. So now say your NordicTrack sells.
What's the process after that?
Rob: So no PayPal. Well, PayPal, I think was, I don't remember when they opened around the same time, but I will not trust them. I don't think they were trusted. So I remember back in the beginning when we were doing it, we didn't have PayPal, whether they were up and going, but not really.
Them intertwined and they weren't mandatory yet, at least for sure. Yeah. No, no, no, no. So back in the day, it was either, you had two options, you had a personal check, which you took a long time to clear because if you took a personal check from somebody in, you're in Florida and somebody from California sent you a personal check, you had to wait for all that stuff to go back to their bank and then come back to you.
It was not a quick process for that to actually clear before you shipped the item out. You could do it quicker if they sent you a money order or a cashier's check and you had that option inside of your listing to say what you would accept and what you wouldn't accept. And I remember even putting if it's a personal, we accept personal checks, but we will wait 10 days before we actually ship your item out to make sure the funds clear and the funds have to clear before we ship it. And that's kind of the process and it was no payment processor. And I don't remember exactly when PayPal came into eBay and did all the stuff that they did. But it wasn't a very trusted because think about it payments online. It was not something that a lot of people trusted versus
Melissa: they'd rather just mail you a check?
Rob: Mail you a personal check.
Melissa: Think about the trust of both parties because the buyer has to trust that the check is going to be good for one and then the seller is sending off a check. It could be deposited and do they know they're even going to get, I mean eBay is the middleman, but they're trusting they're going to get this item that they pay for after the check is deposited. And like that is just that's crazy crazy to me.
And there was one instance where you deposited money from a check and then it ended up being bad and they pulled the money out. And we did an episode on this You actually ended up going to jail for that.
I did. I did. So.
Rob: Sold something, took a cashier. I think it was a cashier's check. My bank cleared it. I wrote checks out on the funds that they put into my account to the DMV and then found out, it was a little while later, this all the whole process took place when I was moving out of my parents house into my own house. They sent me mail saying that the checks had bounced. I didn't know that. They came over a month or two later and arrested me and took me to jail because I bounced like a $300 check to the DMV for my tags, my tag renewal. So, we did an episode on this.
Melissa: It's episode 85.
Rob: 85. If you want to go check it out, it's pretty entertaining.
But, I did go to jail. I spent a day in jail because of that instance and it all stemmed from taking a cashier's check from a scammer that my bank cleared and then after
Melissa: the bank was at fault.
Rob: They did they pulled the money back out of the account and said it was was no good. So crazy crazy thing, but that's how we did it back in the day It was cashier's check or personal check. You had to take that to be able to do it and yeah, it was just crazy. It was, it's crazy to see how far we've come in a short amount of time that where it is so easy to be able to sell and take payments and do all that stuff online.
Melissa: And all that stuff that happened, it still did not stop you.
I mean, it might stop you for a little bit, but you always came back to selling on eBay.
Rob: We'll have to do an episode on the things that actually derailed me from selling because I think of a couple things. I think of that Nordic track that I got the return on. I think of this thing that totally derailed me from selling on eBay for a little while.
But then we always came back.
Melissa: And going to jail might derail you for a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. But you always came back and that's the thing. And even, like, this is a big barrier to entry that you just, to come into this. And so like right now you can do everything from your phone and not saying there aren't things that like in any business, there's going to be things like you'll deal with returns, you'll deal with stuff, but it is way lower barrier to entry than it's ever been in the past.
So easy.
Rob: So easy to get started and do it. And one thing that has kicked up a lot from now, and we talk about you had to have a lot of trust. It was more the had to have trust because the seller was clearing the funds before they actually shipped it out. So the buyer had to have trust that you were a legit person and that's where eBay built their, their name on feedback.
You had to have that feedback. That's why it was so important. It was. And back in the day, believe it or not, guys, you could leave negative feedback as a buyer, a seller, whatever you wanted to. They wanted the truth about it. And then it started to be in, retaliation, retaliation. So if somebody left you bad feedback, you would leave them bad feedback and it wasn't they, eBay couldn't do it.
That's why they made it to now. Buyers can't leave negative, or sorry, sellers can't leave negative feedback. I agree.
Melissa: They should, they should do it like Airbnb, like you can't see the feedback until it's left and then that makes you not retaliate, but tell the truth, you know, you're not going to lie and knowing that you're going to get a retaliation, anyway. I think that would be a good way to do it.
Rob: So that was one of the things that happened back in the day, you def, you had, definitely on target with feedback, both people could leave whatever they wanted, positive, negative feedback, but that made you be as a seller. The buyers would trust you that much more when they could see you had positive feedback and you had interactions for higher profit items that they would know that you were a legit seller versus a scammer.
And you would not buy anything from somebody who had zero feedback that was trying to sell something for $500, a thousand dollars. You wouldn't do that. You wouldn't take that risk, especially when you're mailing them a payment or something like that. So crazy, crazy.
Melissa: Crazy walk down memory lane. So we thought we wanted to hop on and tell you how it used to be because it's just great.
The check thing to me is just crazy that people would just mail checks and you deposit them and like, that's just crazy. That's just crazy. It is. But, anyways.
Rob: Back in the day and we'll see in the next 20 years what it actually goes to. So, so much, so much fun. So, so crazy for sure.
Melissa: Yep. So anyways, so that was just kind of a fun episode we wanted to jump on.
So thanks so much for listening. And if you let us know in, if you're watching this on YouTube or in the comments or shoot us a message on Instagram, let us know when you started on eBay and some of the stuff you remember. I know you, you did say when we were talking about this, that you wish you could log into your old boom speed account.
We
Rob: had so many from the, these are all my original pictures from the nineties that we actually sold stuff and
Melissa: I think the quality of picture, it must've been like,
Rob: I remember I sold boats. I sold some boats cause I love the water. I did. I sold some of them on eBay, and I sold a T Craft. All those pictures were on this website, called BoomSpeed.
They were hosted on there, and after, the, the, the crazy thing about the camera, we're going back into it. But that camera, you had to delete it after it got full of that disk. You had to delete it.
Melissa: I know that feeling on the phone.
Rob: You had to delete it and so all those pictures were gone. But if you uploaded them to your hosting site, you had a, a, a place on the hosting site that they were actually saved on.
So, kind of like iCloud, and that's one of those things that now If I had that, I could see all the things, I would have a record of all the things that we sold back in the 90s and early 2000s, but we don't.
Melissa: Oh, one other thing, somebody had commented, you must have had a lot of patience to do this back, you know, to, for the internet.
That's what they were saying, to load your stuff up. And really, if you think about it, the whole process took a lot of patience, because you couldn't, you know, just like, you get an order, go ship it out, like you're waiting for the payment, then you make sure the funds clear, then, so like there's a, it's a lot, a long process to do this whole thing.
Rob: I remember for more expensive items too, people would overnight you checks. Oh really? So they would overnight it to get the process to speed up versus the snail mail of waiting for the mail to actually get it to you. They would overnight you to check wanting it to clear as quick as they could. So you get it shipped out as quick as you could.
I still remember some of the things like that. It wasn't necessarily for a cheap item, but more towards a nicer, more expensive Nordic track. They wanted the process to be sped up as quick as they could. So they could, you could get it shipped out quickly too.
Melissa: So if you need motivation to go get listing and go get listing, cause the process is much more streamlined than it was.
And yeah, go get listing.
Rob: You guys are awesome. Have an amazing day and we'll catch you on the next episode.