My First Online Money-Making Site? Definitely eBay. But...

My first, and only, online money-making endeavour before I took a chance in the pay-to-click world a few weeks ago is eBay.

Who does not know eBay? I personally earned enough money from eBay to finance some of my vices, like eating out in restaurants, backpack traveling, nightlife (you know, bar gigs/booze/late night movie/late night meals) ... I can go on and on. When you know the current demand and the pulse of the buyers in the online market, eBay does work well.

I will not divulge my eBay account ID, but suffice to say that I was making good money from selling items in our local eBay site in spite of the competition. So many sellers vend products similar to ours. What probably set us apart from them are the quality of our products (when we rate our products in the item description, we tend to underrate them), the type (some of them being sought by some serious collectors), and communication (we emphasize constant communication via email for formality rather than sms messaging which is more preferred in the place where I am from).

Then eBay made a couple of somewhat drastic changes in their policies which I will no longer enumerate as they have not impacted much in our sales ... until one fateful day. There was one new policy that somehow affected the outcome of this particular incident.

The policy: Sellers are not allowed to leave negative feedback on buyers.

It began when we were selling items fast that competitors and more shady buyers were taking notice. Encouraged by our sales, we began releasing more rare, high-ticket items. One item was particularly high-ticket. Soon buyers were placing their bids.

Some unscrupulous accounts took advantage and pushed the bid to hundreds of thousands of dollars (unheard of!) which was an outrage. These accounts were reported to eBay. The case was studied and was ruled in our favor. But the damage has been done. People in a number of forums were suspecting that we actually rigged the bidding process. It was mentally and morally harrowing for me that I soon got tired of selling because I no longer want to experience the same incident again.

I do not mean to discourage you nor solicit pity. It's all water under the bridge. And definitely I do not blame eBay. Maybe we had been too optimistic, which in business is not always a good virtue.

My purpose for this anecdote is for those of you wanting to get into eBay to be a bit wary. Be careful when doing transactions. For, in spite of your efforts to conduct business as honestly as you can, there are many people in the world who succumb to this deadly sin: ENVY.