For Salt Lake City's Jeff Perry, that has translated into growth and success for his GTS Inc. family of companies. One of eBay's elite "power sellers" - high-volume merchants of the e-commerce site that have maintained a favorable customer feedback of 98 percent or better - he runs eight online stores through eBay.
"This has become an extremely important outlet for us," says Perry, who founded GTS in 1973. "Today, a very large percentage of our total business is done on eBay."
This year alone, GTS and its 12 employees have topped $2 million in sales, with the company's family of eBay stores selling everything from new and used Motorola two-way radios, aviation headsets, auto racing communications gear and theater equipment and supplies to light bars for emergency vehicles.
Perry had begun, on a small scale, selling used radios on eBay in 1999. Intrigued, he attended one of eBay University's traveling seminars a couple years later. Soon, he was expanding his commercial endeavors on the auction site with the tips and know-how he obtained from the workshop.
"I've had several e-commerce sites of my own over the years. Now, I am slowly taking those sites down and converting them to eBay platforms," Perry says. "They are just much more productive and give better exposure to our products than we've had before."
A longtime eBay University booster, Perry says he plans to send a couple of his employees to the traveling seminar when it comes to the Salt Lake City Marriott Downtown, 75 S. West Temple, from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. this Saturday.
Presiding over the Salt Lake session will be Jim Griffith, author of The Official eBay Bible. He expects up to 1,000 will attend the $39 seminar in hopes of joining the more than 430,000 people currently making a full- or part-time income by trading on the eBay sites - roughly triple from the number two years ago.
For Griffith, the session will be a return to his former home; he worked in eBay's Draper offices from 1999 to 2003. He is now dean of education for the San Jose, Calif.-based company.
Utah's one-day eBay University event will offer a "Selling Basics" workshop in the morning, a sort of beginner's track to e-commerce. The seminar concludes in the afternoon with "Beyond the Basics," a session geared more toward building and organizing eBay business and managing auctions.
"We provide, with experts, the information people need to either get started selling on eBay, or to ramp up existing businesses to the next level," Griffith says.
He is not surprised to hear Perry is gradually retiring his own e-commerce Web sites in favor of eBay stores. Many clients have followed that course, Griffith says.
"There are two major reasons for that. One is that we offer more traffic than any one person will ever see on their own sites," he says. "The other is there is a lot more confidence when shopping through eBay [than] a site that can be an unknown entity."
Despite the periodic, well-publicized online scams perpetrated on some eBay customers, Perry insists using common sense - and following a few basic rules - should make for a secure, satisfying selling and buying experience on the auction site.
Check the site's feedback section to see how other buyers have fared with a particular seller. Use an established online purchasing service (such as eBay's own PayPal). Never send cash or money orders.
And if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is worth skepticism. "You're not going to really get a plasma TV for $50, for instance," Perry says.
To attend Salt Lake City's eBay University session, register at http://www.ebay.com or call 781-821-6734.
