Subject:
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Legos: A Moneymaking E-Business? (Fortune Magazine)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Tue, 30 Nov 1999 22:34:31 GMT
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Viewed:
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522 times
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FYI: From Fortune Magazine:
Legos: A Moneymaking E-Business?
Power Sellers
Melanie Warner
About a year ago, Heidi Le Vell shelled out $1,000 to buy 24 cardboard boxes
filled with nothing but Legos. Over the next couple of months, she assembled
those chunky pieces of plastic into organized clumps and periodically sold
them on eBay for a total of $15,000.
Neither Le Vell nor her husband, who thought his wife was nuts to blow $1,000
on something as puerile as Legos, knew what to make of her profit. She never
expected the Legos, among her first sales on eBay, to fetch as much as they
did. "I knew I could get $4,000, but this was amazing," she says.
After that it only got better. Le Vell, 27, who lives in San Jose, wasn't
working at the time, so she threw herself into selling on eBay full-time.
Every week she'd go to real-world auctions and estate sales around Silicon
Valley, buying glassware, books, and knickknacks. Then she'd offer them on
eBay, reaping terrific profits. At the high point about six months ago, Le
Vell was pulling in $15,000 a month. In pure profit.
Finally, somebody is making money on the Internet. There's a new subculture of
people selling tons of goods on auction sites and making more money doing it
than you'd ever imagine. We're not talking about the few hundred dollars you'd
get selling your collection of old movie posters or the furniture lying around
in the attic. We're talking about people who've made selling on eBay a full-
time job and are reaping hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it. They're
called power sellers--eBay classifies them as people who sell between $2,000
and $25,000 worth of goods per month. So far there are 22,000 of them on the
site; eBay execs expect that number to grow fast.
Of course, where there are new markets there are startups. Andale (
www.andale.com) has been founded and funded ($20 million from venture firms
Mohr Davidow and Accel) on the idea that people who sell $10,000 of goods a
month need help keeping track of it all. The site, which launched in mid-
November, aims to save power sellers time by offering them the ability to
automate their selling. For a small transaction fee, Andale puts items up for
sale, automatically calculates tax and shipping costs, generates invoices,
provides credit card services, and does basic financial accounting.
Le Vell met 26-year-old CEO and co-founder Munjal Shah at a barbecue this past
summer. Now she's working for him. Her title, one of those silly monikers you
find only at tech companies, is "customer evangelist." Most of what she does
is communicate with power sellers like herself to help Andale figure out what
they want from an auction services site.
Le Vell continues to sell on eBay, pulling in $7,000 last month. She's had to
scale down her selling, since the Andale gig means working startup hours. On
weekends, though, Le Vell continues to go to auctions around Silicon Valley
and hunt for unusual items to resell. Usually she finds no shortage of
underpriced goods, which she then sells for, oh, four times her outlay. If she
ever fails to find things to buy, she's still got Legos in her garage.
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Message has 4 Replies:
 | | Re: Legos: A Moneymaking E-Business? (Fortune Magazine)
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| I remember watching her auctions - she had hundreds and hundreds, by the look of it, broken down by type of piece, all photographed and described. I wonder what her final hourly wage was. She had a 30-pound lot go recently, I believe, so that may (...) (25 years ago, 4-Dec-99, to lugnet.general)
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