Subject:
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Re: 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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Sat, 4 Dec 1999 01:31:30 GMT
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Viewed:
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556 times
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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 have been the last of it. I hope she had fun, otherwise she'll
probably never want to look at another piece of Lego.
Cheers, Heather
In lugnet.general, Derick Bulkley writes:
> 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 1 Reply:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Legos: A Moneymaking E-Business? (Fortune Magazine)
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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 (...) (25 years ago, 30-Nov-99, to lugnet.general)
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