eBay from an Early Seller
- joe Tonelli
- Sep 9
- 9 min read
This week's blog post is going to be about my experiences over the past 27 years as an eBay seller.
I remember first hearing about eBay in late 1995 from my mother, and at the time I had no idea what it was. Shortly thereafter, I decided to investigate to see what it was all about.
Initially, I was skeptical but ultimately ended up creating an account. A friend asked me the other day what the first thing I ever bought on eBay was, and I have to honestly say I can't remember. At the time, I wasn't really collecting anything, and we were still recovering from the crash of the vintage clothing market in the mid-'90s due to the state of the Japanese economy. In another post, I shall relay my experiences as a vintage clothing dealer, or as we used to be called in the day, a rag man.
In early 1998, I decided to give selling on eBay a try. I deleted my personal account and started another one with the sole purpose of selling. That was February 15th, 1998. Since then, I've bought and sold literally hundreds of thousands of items.
At that time, eBay was an amazing and incredibly basic platform. When I started, I didn't even have a digital camera because it was relatively new and expensive technology. So, I would take photos with my film camera, take the film to a two-hour developing store, pick up my prints, and return home. I would literally cut out the objects, create a collage by gluing the cropped photos onto an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper, and then scan it. That scan would be my photo for the item.
What made eBay so successful for me was my established history in the collectible’s world long before computers and cell phones. Once I became comfortable with the platform and understood its basic operations, I started to actively buy as much stuff as I could find to sell. Most of the people I knew in the collectible’s world were from my parents' age group and very suspicious of the government, especially computers. Rarely did anyone accept anything but cash, and all sales were usually face-to-face at a specialized collectibles show or a flea market. So even though these people had heard about eBay, they were terrified that Big Brother was watching them and wanted nothing to do with it. Their fear provided a perfect opportunity for me; even though they knew things were selling on eBay, they had no idea how to access it. Eventually, many of them overcame these fears, but it wasn't until a few years later. It was amazing because it seemed like you could buy anything and sell it for a profit.
By 2002, I had streamlined my eBay business and focused it mainly on original vintage military photographs. This was something I stumbled on by mistake. I remember purchasing a large grouping from a U.S. Army veteran who served in the South Pacific. In this grouping, there was a beautiful photograph of a captured Japanese Zero fighter plane.
At that time, photographs were everywhere and had little value; maybe a very expensive one would have been $10. For some reason, I decided to list this photograph individually on eBay. Much to my surprise, it sold for $65. Immediately, a light bulb went off. I started to do a little research and learned that photographs were selling for anywhere from $5 to $25. It was like I had found gold!
I knew these photographs could be bought for as little as $0.25 apiece at shows. Often, there would be shoeboxes or old cigar boxes filled with photographs offered for $5 to $20 for the entire box. And then, of course, there were actual photo albums.
When I first started to focus on photographs, I came up with a basic formula. From what I had seen and sold, I was confident that any photograph with a tank or an airplane in it would bring at least $10. My simple formula was to count the number of tank and airplane photos and multiply by ten; that was the minimum I could get for the contents of an album. Thinking about it now makes me chuckle.
It wasn't long before my education advanced, and I learned the nuances of the market. Within a year and a half of selling that first photograph for $65, my business grew to four employees, averaging 4,000 items a week. I traveled all over the country and to Europe several times in search of vintage photographs.
I've sold hundreds of thousands of photographs, a number that eBay's own statistics completely fail to capture. This isn't an exaggeration—it's a contradiction born from a 2007 policy change. When eBay stopped counting sales and feedback per item and started counting per transaction, it didn't just change my statistics, it invalidated them. My business was built on large orders from dedicated collectors, this wasn't just a policy update. It was a negation. A single buyer could purchase fifty photos and leave fifty feedbacks, each one a testament to a successful sale that now only counted as one transaction. Overnight, that entire history was condensed. My feedback score plummeted from tens of thousands to just a few thousand. My lifetime sales count became a tiny fraction of the truth. It was a clear message: the metrics of the old-school, high-volume seller no longer mattered to the new eBay. It was the first time I felt eBay was not just changing the rules but actively erasing the history of the sellers who built it.
eBay's reasoning was to protect sellers from feedback bombing, where one unhappy buyer with a multiple-item order could leave a massive wave of negative feedback, disproportionately harming a seller's reputation. A single problem with one order now resulted in one negative, not 10 or 100. But the consequence for high-quality sellers was that we lost the positive feedback we used to receive. From my perspective, this was extremely unfair given the hard work it took to build my feedback.
This was compounded by another change in May 2008, when sellers could no longer leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers. This left many sellers feeling completely exposed and at the mercy of the customer. A buyer could leave negative feedback for any reason, and it could not be removed.
I once sold an item for $15, sent it promptly, and it was exactly as described. The buyer left negative feedback. I asked why, and they simply claimed they weren't happy with it. I apologized, offered a full refund with no need to return the item, and asked if they would remove the feedback. They agreed, took the refund, but never removed the feedback. Even though everything was documented within eBay's system, they refused to remove the negative.
This was when eBay ceased to be about the collectibles community. It gradually transitioned from a predominantly collectibles-focused platform to a general sales platform. The growth of e-commerce and the increasing presence of professional sellers led to more new items than collectibles. While it started as an online auction house for used goods, increasing demand from businesses and new selling formats facilitated this evolution over time.
As the internet grew, more professional businesses and retailers began listing new and diverse products on eBay. The platform's ability to connect with manufacturers and retailers became a significant part of its success, evolving to support B2B transactions and methods beyond traditional auctions. This influx meant the range of items sold expanded far beyond a niche market of collectibles.
Many early sellers like me began to feel we were more of a nuisance than the backbone that built eBay's selling platform. Fees became increasingly expensive. Communication between buyers and sellers became increasingly difficult, policed by eBay in militant fashion.
I remember my first eBay username was my actual email address! For over 15 years, your user ID was simply your email. This made communication direct. eBay claimed it exposed personal information and led to spam, but many in the community felt it was to stop users from completing transactions off eBay to avoid ever-increasing fees. In spring 2011, eBay announced that all new members must choose an alphanumeric user ID. Existing members were grandfathered in but encouraged to change for "privacy and security reasons." This was a precursor to stricter communication policies.
eBay began seriously policing and restricting communication between buyers and sellers starting in mid-2014, with policies tightening significantly through 2015 and 2016. This wasn't a sudden change but a deliberate campaign to keep all transactions and communications on-platform. The goal was to prevent users from making deals offline; eBay wanted control of everything, just as they did with payments.
Another crazy thing about early eBay was getting paid! It was the Wild West. Payment came by mail—cash, money orders, checks (and you had to wait for a check to clear before sending the item). Then came PayPal! It began as a revolutionary, independent tool that sellers flocked to by choice. It solved eBay's biggest trust and speed issue: it allowed buyers to pay instantly with a credit card, so sellers got paid immediately and could ship faster. For a period, it was even free to use, an unbeatable advantage.
Its massive popularity made it indispensable, leading eBay to acquire it in 2002. The relationship quickly changed from a partnership to a mandate. By 2008, PayPal was required for all sellers, transforming it from a free convenience into a costly necessity. This introduced the era of "double-dipping," where we paid a final value fee to eBay and a processing fee to PayPal. What made PayPal a success, its efficiency and seller-driven adoption—was undermined after eBay made it compulsory and expensive. The relationship soured, leading to a corporate breakup in 2015. eBay has since replaced it with its own in-house system, ending PayPal's central role. But eBay became a billion-dollar platform, and the little seller didn't mean much anymore.
In the early 2000s, I was considered a bigger seller. I had my own account assistant at eBay that I could call on the phone with issues! At that time, I used the eBay listing tool Turbo Lister. While other third-party tools existed, eBay promoted Turbo Lister as its official downloadable application for creating and managing listings.
For me and many other high-volume sellers, this was the greatest thing to happen to eBay! Turbo Lister was a free, beloved desktop application launched in the early 2000s. It became massively popular because it solved a major problem: it allowed us to create and schedule hundreds of listings offline using templates, then upload them all at once, saving an enormous amount of time. For years, it was an essential, free tool that fueled the growth of countless small businesses on the platform. Its simplicity and power made it a favorite.
However, eBay's strategy shifted. The company moved its focus away from supporting a free desktop tool and toward integrated, web-based systems and paid third-party services. This shift led to Turbo Lister's demise. eBay first tried to replace it with a costly, subscription-based version called Turbo Lister Pro in 2013, which sellers immediately rejected as expensive and inferior. After this failure, eBay simply stopped supporting the original tool and eventually shut down the servers it needed to function. In the end, what made Turbo Lister popular—its simplicity and being free—was undone when eBay made it more complicated and expensive, leading to its abrupt end.
By 2009, all the changes and the cost of selling on eBay had reached a point where it no longer made good business sense for me. I started my own online auction business, Tonelli Auctions and Collectibles, which I ran for three years before ultimately returning to my career in construction.
Now that I am retired, I have this platform. I still occasionally list things on eBay, but it is more for nostalgia than anything else.
eBay forever changed the antiques and collectibles business. For a while, I thought it was for the better. At first, there were unlimited things to buy and unlimited buyers to sell to. But 27 years later, I now see it killed everything I loved about the collectibles business. I remember lying awake the night before a estate auction, military show, or flea market, crazy with excitement for the treasure hunt to come, the possibilities of the next find, and seeing my friends and sharing experiences.
Those days are all but gone, except for a few shows. I remember when there was a show of some sort every weekend. It meant getting up early and driving, sometimes for hours, to arrive on time. They were always great, as were the people. Now we simply turn on a computer or open an app; with enough money, you can buy whatever your heart desires. It has become very impersonal.
While the early years of eBay were very lucrative and brought many great things to market, it changed everything.
Now I am the grubby old man who misses the old days (which I have found again in Mexico, another blog post to come), and I ultimately think it was the worst thing to ever happen to the collectibles business for those of us who knew it before eBay.
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