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 01:58:26 GMT
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Viewed:
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456 times
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My question is, WHERE THE HELL did she find 24 boxes of Lego?!? I live in
Sunnyvale, right next to San Jose, and NEVER find Lego in secondhand shops of any
kind.
Scott-A wrote:
> It must have been a big box of Lego if she shelled out $1000, and made that sort
> of profit? Has anyone bought from her? What was in the box?
>
> Scott A
>
> derick Bulkley wrote:
>
> > 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.
--
Tom Stangl
***http://www.vfaq.com/
***DSM Visual FAQ home
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