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Published on: 10/22/2003
Last Visited: 10/22/2003
"What we do is insulate people from the process," said E-Powersellers President Craig Solomon."On eBay you have to put your name, your telephone and your banking information.That's scary for a lot of people."
E-Powersellers began five years ago as a Web site for other eBay sellers to post questions and share tips - what sold, what didn't, how to price and so on.
"What we found was most of these people were stay-at-home moms - people that didn't want to leave the house so they could keep an eye on their kids," Solomon said."They weren't tech-savvy, so we tried to show them how to do (code Web pages), how to do images, that kind of thing."
After a time, Solomon found he was losing money on the upkeep of the Web site and decided to change the format of both the business and the site.
The result is the current version of Solomon's online brokerage, now in its 18th month of business and its 12th month in its downtown Albany location.He says revenues have been good, although the current week has been a little slow.
"Anytime there's a sports highlight, activity on eBay slows down.So the fact that there's both baseball and football going on right now hurts us a little.But the holidays should be excellent," he said.
While most online retailers do the bulk of their business during the holiday season, Solomon prefers the week after New Year's.
"That's when all the gifts people didn't want come back to eBay's recycle-land," he said.
Plans for the business include opening up storefronts in other cities, as well as finding a larger headquarters in Albany.
"It's hard to get Eugene and Salem business because the people down there aren't up here all the time," Solomon said.
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It makes sense to take something that's templated and run with it," Solomon said.
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