Ebay Sayings And Quotes

We all have that one friend who says, "I had the idea for eBay. If only I had acted on it, I'd be a billionaire!" That logic is pathetic and delusional. Having the idea for eBay has nothing to do with actually creating eBay. What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.

eBay is a fine place to unload your Prada bag when you're in a desperate situation and it's exactly what the doctor ordered when searching for a specific item, say an authentic 1965 edition of the game Mystery Date. eBay is a very, very bad place to go if you're a hypercompetitive asshole with a penchant for spite bidding.

To the man standing on the corner holding the sign that said “God hates gays.” I’ve never seen, exactly who it is that you paperclip your knees, meld your hands together and pray to But I think I know what he looks like: I bet your God is about 5’10”. I bet he weighs 185. Probably stands the way a high school diploma does when it’s next to a GED. I bet your god has a mullet. I bet he wears flannel shirts with no sleeves, a fanny pack and says words like “getrdun.” I bet your god—I bet your god—I bet your god watches FOX news, Dog the Bounty Hunter, voted for John McCain, and loves Bill O’Reilly. I bet your god lives in Arizona. I bet his high school served racism in the cafeteria and offered “hate speech” as a second language. I bet he has a swastika inside of his throat, and racial slurs tattooed to his tongue just to make intolerance more comfortable in his mouth. I bet he has a burning cross as a middle finger and Jim Crow underneath his nails. Your god is a confederate flags wet dream conceived on a day when the sky decided to slice her own wrists, I bet your god has a drinking problem. I bet he sees the bottom of the shot glass more often than his own children. I bet he pours whiskey on his dreams until they taste like good ideas, Probably cusses like an electric guitar with Tourette’s plugged into an ocean. I bet he yells like a schizophrenic nail gun, damaging all things that care about him enough to get close. I bet there are angels in Heaven with black eyes and broken halos who claimed they fell down the stairs. I bet your god would’ve made Eve without a mouth and taught her how to spread her legs like a magazine that she will never ever ever be pretty enough to be in. Sooner or later you will realize that you are praying to your own shadow, that you are standing in front of mirrors and are worshipping your own reflection. Your God stole my god’s identity and I bet he’s buying pieces of heaven on eBay. So next time you bend your knees, next time you bow your head I want you to tell your god— that my god is looking for him.

Here's why I'm afraid of life after death: What if there is no nicotine gum? I must have access to my nicotine gum at all times. I kiss with the gum. I sleep with the gum. Anything you can do without the gum I must do with the gum. I am chewing the gum right now. I chew the gum, because I don’t trust the universe to fill me up on its own. I can’t count on the universe to sate my many holes: physical, emotional, spiritual. So I take matters into my own hands. I give myself little “doggy treats” for being alive. Each time I unwrap a new piece of nicotine gum and put it in my mouth (roughly every thirty minutes), I generate a sense of synthetic hope and potentiality. I am self-soothing. I am “being my own mommy.” I am saying, Here you go, my darling. I know life hurts. I know reality is itchy. But open your mouth. A fresh chance at happiness has arrived! I’ve been chewing nicotine gum for twelve years. I haven’t had a cigarette in ten years. So you might say the gum works, except now I have a gum problem. I am so addicted to the gum that I have to order it from special “dealers” in bulk on eBay. I get gum on all the bedding. There are many reasons why I don’t think I will have children, but the necessity of getting off the gum during pregnancy is one of them. When it comes down to anything vs. the gum, I always choose the gum. Now let me just say, before we go any further, that if you’re thinking of using nicotine gum to quit smoking you should not let my experience scare you. I am the addict’s addict. Everything I touch turns to dopamine. I can even turn people into dopamine (ask me how!).

The courtship continued through January 2000, causing Musk to postpone his honeymoon with Justine. Michael Moritz, X.com’s primary investor, arranged a meeting of the two camps in his Sand Hill Road office. Thiel got a ride with Musk in his McLaren. “So, what can this car do?” Thiel asked. “Watch this,” Musk replied, pulling into the fast lane and flooring the accelerator. The rear axle broke and the car spun around, hit an embankment, and flew in the air like a flying saucer. Parts of the body shredded. Thiel, a practicing libertarian, was not wearing a seatbelt, but he emerged unscathed. He was able to hitch a ride up to the Sequoia offices. Musk, also unhurt, stayed behind for a half-hour to have his car towed away, then joined the meeting without telling Harris what had happened. Later, Musk was able to laugh and say, “At least it showed Peter I was unafraid of risks.” Says Thiel, “Yeah, I realized he was a bit crazy.” Musk remained resistant to a merger. Even though both companies had about 200,000 customers signed up to make electronic payments on eBay, he believed that X.com was a more valuable company because it offered a broader array of banking services.

If my husband tells me one more time that he needs to rest because he “worked all day,” I will throw all of his clothes on the front lawn, kick his car into neutral and watch it roll away and I’ll sell all of his precious sports stuff on eBay for a dollar. And then I’ll kill him. He seriously doesn’t get it! Yes, he worked all day, but he worked with English speaking, potty trained, fully capable adults. He didn’t have to change their diapers, give them naps and clean their lunch from the wall. He didn’t have to count to 10 to calm himself, he didn’t have to watch Barney 303,243,243 times, and he didn’t have to pop his boob out 6 times to feed a hungry baby and I KNOW he didn’t have peanut butter and jelly crust for lunch. He DID get TWO 15-minute breaks to “stroll,” an hour break to hit the gym, and a 1 hour train ride home to read or nap. So maybe I don’t get a paycheck, maybe I stay in my sweatpants most of the day, maybe I only shower every 2 or 3 days, maybe I get to “play” with our kids all day … I still work a hell of a lot harder in one hour than he does all day. So take your paycheck, stick it in the bank and let me go get a freakin’ pedicure once a month without hearing you say “Maybe if you got a job … and had your own money.” Ouch.

I turn to see what she’s looking at, and it’s a red convertible Mustang driving down our street, top down--with John McClaren at the wheel. My jaw drops at the sight of him. He is in full uniform: tan dress shirt with tan tie, tan slacks, tan belt and hat. His hair is parted to the side. He looks dashing, like a real soldier. He grins at me and waves. “Whoa,” I breathe. “Whoa is right,” Ms. Rothschild says, googly-eyed beside me. Daddy and his Ken Burns DVD are forgotten; we are all staring at John in this uniform, in this car. It’s like I dreamed him up. He parks the car in front of the house, and all of us rush up to it. “Whose car is this?” Kitty demands. “It’s my dad’s,” John says. “I borrowed it. I had to promise to park really far away from any other car, though, so I hope your shoes are comfortable, Lara Jean--” He breaks off and looks me up and down. “Wow. You look amazing.” He gestures at my cinnamon bun. “I mean, your hair looks so…real.” “It is real!” I touch it gingerly, I’m suddenly feeling self-conscious about my cinnamon-bun head and red lipstick. “I know--I mean, it looks authentic.” “So do you,” I say. “Can I sit in it?” Kitty butts in, her hand on the passenger-side door. “Sure,” John says. He climbs out of the car. “But don’t you want to get in the driver’s seat?” Kitty nods quickly. Ms. Rothschild gets in too, and Daddy takes a picture of them together. Kitty poses with one arm casually draped over the steering wheel. John and I stand off to the side, and I ask him, “Where did you ever get that uniform?” “I ordered it off of eBay.” He frowns. “Am I wearing the hat right? Do you think it’s too small for my head?” “No way. I think it looks exactly the way it’s supposed to look.” I’m touched that he went to the trouble of ordering a uniform for this. I can’t think of many boys who would do that. “Stormy is going to flip out when she sees you.” He studies my face. “What about you? Do you like it?” I flush. “I do. I think you look…super.

Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term “growth hacker” came out of, put it well: “The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”12 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks). 9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).

What do you call an evil leader digging a hole? Darth Spader   What do you call Obi Wan eating crunchy toast? Obi Crumb   What do call a padawan who likes to play computer games? i'Pad' me   What do you call a starship pilot who likes to drink cocoa? Han Coco   What starship is always happy to have people aboard? The Millennium Welcome   What did Yoda say to Luke while eating dinner? Use the fork Luke.   What do you call a Sith who won't fight? A Sithy.   Which Star Wars character uses meat for a weapon instead of a Lightsaber? Obi Wan Baloney.   What do call a smelly droid? R2DPOO   What do call a droid that has wet its pants? C3PEE0   What do you call a Jedi who loves pies? Luke PieWalker?   What do call captain Rex when he emailing on a phone? Captain Text   What evil leader doesn’t need help reaching? Ladder the Hutt   What kind of evil lord will always say goodbye? Darth Later   Which rebel will always win the limbo? Han LowLow   What do you call R2D2 when he’s older? R2D3   What do you call R2D2 when he’s busting to go to the toilet? R2DLoo   What do call Padme’s father? Dadme   What’s do you call the Death Star when its wet? The Death Spa   What do call R2D2 when he climbs a tree? R2Tree2   What do you say a Jedi adding ketchup to his dinner? Use the sauce Luke.   What star wars baddy is most likely to go crazy? Count KooKoo   What do call Count Dooku when he’s really sad? Count Boohoo   Which Jedi is most likely to trick someone? Luke Liewalker   Which evil lord is most likely to be a dad? Dadda the Hutt   Which rebel likes to drink through straws? Chew Sucker   Which space station can you eat from? The Death bar   What do call a moody rebel? Luke Sighwalker   What do you call an even older droid R2D4   What do call Darth Vader with lots of scrapes? Dearth Grazer   What call an evil lord on eBay? Darth Trader   What do call it when an evil lord pays his mum? Darth Paid-her   What do call an evil insect Darth Cicada   What sith always teases? General Teasers   Who's the scariest sith? Count Spooko   Which sith always uses his spoon to eat his lunch Count Spoonu   What evil lord has lots of people living next door? Darth Neighbour   What Jedi always looks well dressed? Luke TieWalker   Which evil lord works in a restaurant? Darth waiter   What do you call a smelly storm trooper? A storm pooper   What do you call Darth Vader digging a hole? Darth Spader   What do you C3PO wetting his pants? C3PEE0   What do you call Asoka’s pet frog? Acroaka   What do you call a Jedi that loves pies? Luke Piewalker   What rebel loves hot drinks? Han Coco   What did Leia say to Luke at the dinner table? Use the fork Luke.   What do call Obi Wan eating fruit? Obi plum   What do you call Obi in a band? Obi Drum   What doe Luke take out at night? A Night Sabre   What is the favourite cooking pot on Endor? The e Wok

On Relationships – The end of Midsomar is harrowing but the director claims that it’s meant to be a breakup film. The man has the right concept although you have to question the execution (no pun intended). Contrast that heroine to Demi Moore’s Molly in the movie Ghost. When her lover dies, she spends the majority of the film in maudlin tears, holding on to the scraps of their affair. His ghost lingers near her, inaudible and invisible, staring in disbelief when she clings to the stub of a concert they once attended. He points out that she hated that concert so why keep that stub? Why cling to the detritus of an affair spent with a man too gutless to say he loved her? When a relationship is over, then it’s time to sell the ex’s possessions on Ebay. What can’t be sold should be donated to Goodwill—and don’t forget to get that slip of paper so you can claim the donation on your taxes! What Goodwill won’t accept, you give to your family, friends and loved ones. What they won’t take, you toss in the trash or, for the true cathartic effect, you pile in a heap on the lawn and burn it to ashes.

The Random Book Club is an offshoot of the shop which I set up a few years ago when business was sore and the future looked bleak. For £59 a year subscribers receive a book a month, but they have no say over what genre of book they receive, and quality control is entirely down to me. I am extremely judicious in what I choose to put in the box from which the RBC books are parcelled and sent. Since subscribers are clearly inveterate readers, I always take care to pick books that I think anyone who loves reading for its own sake would enjoy. There is nothing that would require too much technical expertise to understand: a mix of fiction and non-fiction, with the weight slightly towards non-fiction, and some poetry. Among the books going out later this month are a copy of Clive James’s Other Passports, Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, Iris Murdoch’s biography of Sartre, Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice, and a book called 100+ Principles of Genetics. All the books are in good condition, none is ex-library, and some – several of them each year – are hundreds of years old. I estimate that if the members decided to sell the books on eBay, they would more than make their money back. There is a forum on the web site, but nobody uses it, which gives me an insight into the type of person who is attracted to the idea – they don’t like clubs where they have to interact with other people. Perhaps that is why I came up with the idea in the first place – it is a sort of Groucho Marx approach to clubs. There are about 150 members and, apart from a minimal amount of advertising in the Literary Review, the only marketing I do is to have a web site and Facebook page, neither of which I have updated for some time. Word of mouth seems to have been the best way of marketing it. It has saved me from financial embarrassment during a very difficult time in the book trade.

left side. Under the box that says RMA Number,

One way to make yourself less vulnerable to copycats is to build a moat around your business. How Can I Build a Moat? As you scale your company, you need to think about how to proactively defend against competition. The more success you have, the more your competitors will grab their battering ram and start storming the castle. In medieval times, you’d dig a moat to keep enemy armies from getting anywhere near your castle. In business, you think about your economic moat. The idea of an economic moat was popularized by the business magnate and investor Warren Buffett. It refers to a company’s distinct advantage over its competitors, which allows it to protect its market share and profitability. This is hugely important in a competitive space because it’s easy to become commoditized if you don’t have some type of differentiation. In SaaS, I’ve seen four types of moats. Integrations (Network Effect) Network effect is when the value of a product or service increases because of the number of users in the network. A network of one telephone isn’t useful. Add a second telephone, and you can call each other. But add a hundred telephones, and the network is suddenly quite valuable. Network effects are fantastic moats. Think about eBay or Craigs-list, which have huge amounts of sellers and buyers already on their platforms. It’s difficult to compete with them because everyone’s already there. In SaaS—particularly in bootstrapped SaaS companies—the network effect moat comes not from users, but integrations. Zapier is the prototypical example of this. It’s a juggernaut, and not only because it’s integrated with over 3,000 apps. It has widened its moat with nonpublic API integrations, meaning that if you want to compete with it, you have to go to that other company and get their internal development team to build an API for you. That’s a huge hill to climb if you want to launch a Zapier competitor. Every integration a customer activates in your product, especially if it puts more of their data into your database, is another reason for them not to switch to a competitor. A Strong Brand When we talk about your brand, we’re not talking about your color scheme or logo. Your brand is your reputation—it’s what people say about your company when you’re not around.

Final Note: When it comes to the Robert Talbott ties I like to stick to the ones that say “Best of Class”. Also I find the ties within this brand that sell best have an interesting pattern

Ebay is still the number one site for individuals and small businesses to sell their items to people worldwide. While it is much larger than it was initially, at its core, Ebay still functions like the world’s largest flea market with items of every type and at every price point available. Ebay continues to expand and improve, giving sellers like me confidence that they will be around for years to come. With nearly two hundred million registered Ebay users, there are still plenty of opportunities to make money on Ebay. But why sell your items on Ebay instead of a garage sale or consignment shop? Hands down, you will get the most money for your items on Ebay versus selling them locally. As I mentioned earlier, there are nearly 200 million registered Ebay users, meaning there are 200 million more chances to sell your items. Let’s say you have a rare collectible to sell. While only a handful of people will come to your garage sale or enter your local consignment shop, on Ebay, your item is available for purchase to the millions of Ebay account holders worldwide. You only need to wait for that one

Max Levchin’s Plan A was not to be. Demand for security on handheld devices never materialized. He remained a vagabond. But he was cooking another idea. Max pursued a Plan B that centered on cryptography software. “It’s really cool, it’s mathematically complex, it’s very secure,” said Levchin.7 But once again, no one really needed it. Plans C, D, and E didn’t work out any better. Levchin’s Plan F, still based on his cryptography expertise, was a system for securely transferring cash from one PalmPilot to another. As part of that effort, Levchin’s team built a Web-based demo version that did everything on a Web site that the PalmPilot version could do. By early 2000, people were using the Web version for actual transactions, and the growth of the Web demo was more impressive than for the handheld version. “Inexplicable,” recalled Levchin. “The handheld one was cool and the Web site was … unsexy … a demo. Then all these people from a site called eBay were contacting us and saying, ‘can I put your logo in my auction?’ We told them ‘No. Don’t do it.’ Eventually, we realized that these guys were begging to be our users. We had the moment of epiphany. For the next twelve months, we just iterated like crazy on the Web site version.”8 Levchin finally had a tool that filled a void, allowing ravenous eBay traders to safely transfer cash from buyer to seller. Plan G—a little outfit called PayPal—was born. And did it strike gold. PayPal is the now dominant system of paying securely for online purchases. Eventually, eBay, whose internally run payment system was floundering, bought PayPal for $1.5 billion.

Traffic on Amazon was oriented around Amazon’s reliable product catalog. On eBay, a customer might search for the Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises and get dozens of auctions of new and vintage copies. If a customer searched for the book on Amazon, there was one single page, with a definitive description of the novel, and that’s where customers flocked. Amazon executives reasoned that day that they had the Internet’s most authoritative product catalog and that they should exploit it. That, it turned out, was the central insight that not only turned Amazon into a thriving platform for small online merchants but powers a good deal of its success today. If Amazon wanted to host other sellers on its site, it would have to list their wares right alongside its own products on the pages that customers actually visited. “It was a great meeting,” says Jeff Blackburn. “By the end of the day we all felt one hundred percent sure that this was the future.

The high-tech community was getting a lesson in the dynamics of network effects—products or services become increasingly valuable as more people use them. In online marketplaces, the network effect was pervasive; sellers stuck around for access to a critical mass of buyers, and vice versa. In the auctions category, eBay already had an insurmountable advantage. Amazon’s executives remember this significant failure as painful but strangely uplifting. “Those days in the nineties were the most intense, fun time I ever had at the company,” Blackburn says. “We had an insanely talented group of people trying to figure out how to launch a superior auctions site. In the end the network effect mattered. You could say we were naïve, but we built a great product.