My wife, daughter, and I were getting ready to move to Taiwan. With one-way tickets in hands, we were waiting for the big trip to come, a trip, which will take about 20 hrs, flying from Raleigh to Taipei in August 2005. The only thing left to do was to get rid of everything we owned quickly.
Overwhelmed, we decided to sell one house, two cars, four bedrooms of furniture, appliances, big screen TV and smaller ones, kitchen stuff, treadmill, living room, dinning room, garage junk and all the stuff that we have accumulated so far in life, etc. Everything needed to go! Well, we had three weeks to sell it all. How do we do that? eBay? craigslist? Neighborhood yardsales? Traditional garagesales? How were we going to have time to do all these things? Not to mention, my wife was finishing school and I was still doing full-time consulting work for a Charlotte based financial firm.
I told myself, "Haven't you been helping companies with their web strategies and implementation throughout your professional life? Why not come up with a website to auction things off. Well, two days later, I had a simple 'hand-coded' static html website ready to go, hosted on my server at home. You know the saying, “The shoemaker’s children have no shoes”. In my case, it is very true. I have never actually crafted web strategies or implemented any websites for myself. Now, I actually did. I quickly designed a hand-coded static html auction website. Anyway, I had everything listed on this website in two days. Here is the hard part, how in the world do I attract all the buyers out there, just like ebay and craigslist do? If there is no one looking at my auction, my things are not going anywhere. I was tired after two sleepless nights, so I went to sleep, I would THINK again in the morning.
Well, one thing that I came up with the next morning, actually a pretty good idea after-all, was to post my auction address on a couple of well-known classified/auction sites, (i.e. craigslist, ebay) and to email the auction address to all my friends and family telling them I was getting rid of things, and also asked them to chain-letter the email to all their contacts. I had no idea what was about to happen! In ten days, I had almost 14 thousands hits on my auction site and I sold all my stuff. My house was empty in ten days. Not expecting to sell everything so fast, we then had to move in to my wife's parents' home for the rest of our stay in the U.S. before we left for Taiwan.
We were totally surprised by how much money we made from our moving sale. Before we had the auction, we estimated, at most, we would probably make US$5,000 - US$6,000 top. We counted the cash right after all the stuff was gone. We actually had nearly US$15,000 in the shoebox. Everything went so smoothly, most people showed up between 8am - 11am that Saturday morning to pick up their winning prizes. There were a couple of no shows, but the runner-ups got the prizes instead, so everybody was happy. Wow, we definitely will say good-bye to the traditional garage/moving sales in the future, lets all do it online now, THE AUCTION STYLE!!!
Ironically, after eight months in Taiwan, we decided to move back to the U.S.. We found ourselves in the exact same situation; we needed to get rid of all the stuff we had in our Taipei apartment. Now, this time, I decided to come up with a simple tool that even my wife could use to create an auction website by just uploading photos and writing the descriptions. So, my wife created our auction using the tool, then she posted the website address on parentpages.net, forumosa.com and kijiji (craigslist is not popular outside of the U.S., too bad, that's why eBay created kijiji). We also emailed the auction website to all our local friends and family. Again, we got more then what we wanted for in a week before we left Taiwan in April 2006.
After we came back to the U.S., a lot of people requested to use this tool after seeing how it worked for us. So, here it is, MyBidList.com is born. It is in beta now, very rough looking, but it will get better and nicer overtime, just come back and check its progress often. The important thing is, it is here now and it is helping people. Here is one auction website, created by a friend of ours, and she put one post about her sales here.
If you find yourself in the similar situation like us, or if you just have some stuff to get rid of, or even if you want to get some extra cash by starting an auction website, feel free to use this tool at:
http://www.mybidlist.com/
And, remember, post your auction web address to as many popular local classified sites, forums, even local printed ads as possible, and email it out to as many people as you can. Plus ask your friends and family to forward it to their contacts. Your auctions will only be as successful as your promotion and marketing. Use some creative ideas, and come up with better ways to use it and attract buyers and don’t forget to let us know.
Here are a few websites that I can think of at the moment, where you could post your website to get more buyers:
http://www.craigslist.org/
http://www.ebay.com/
http://auctions.yahoo.com/
http://www.kijiji.com/
http://base.google.com/
Please comment on this blog to share with us, if you found some other good ones that are more popular in where you live or you have come up with better ways for using this tool.
Enjoy it - AUCTION STYLE!
