Catching Up

It's 2007! We welcomed the New Year with friends and family and stayed up until midnight. We had a great time! In the past few months we have been busy with school and sports activities. One of our New Year resolutions is to update our blog and keep you more informed about what we are doing. Kelsey and I are looking forward to a very fun year.

As I mentioned above, school has been busy but I am learning a lot. In my class we were studying Native Americans and the class decided that we wanted to make drums. In order to make the drums we needed to buy tools and materials. We did not have the money and we already asked parents for donations for other projects. My amazing teacher had an excel-a-brilliant (excellent and brilliant) idea to host an eBay auction. For this auction all the kids in my class would bring items from home or buy items and bring them into the classroom so we could sell them.

One of the things my teacher shared with us was a contest that his family used to have every week to see who could find the best garage sale item for $10 or less and sell it on eBay for the most profit. He shared this story with us to motivate us in our effort to find a good item to sell for the class auction.

A couple days later, on the weekend, my family went to some garage sales to purchase an item. What we found was a St. Louis Cardinals baseball dish/ash tray and a metal, old-time, miniature automobile. I brought my items into class like everyone else and then we started on a series of steps for our auction:

1. We selected our items to sell
2. Researched the item
3. Created an advertisements based upon our research
4. Took pictures of the items
5. Weighed our objects

After most of the class completed these steps, we input our information into TurboLister, which is a program, offered by eBay that helps you easily list your items. After all this was complete, we uploaded our advertisement onto eBay. Now all we had to do was watch our ads on eBay, respond to customer questions truthfully and at the end of the auction, send an invoice to the winning bidder.

Once the auction was over, we waited for the payment from the winning bidders and after the payment was received, we boxed and shipped the items. After the transaction, we left feedback for the customer and the customer in turn left feedback for us regarding how well the transaction was completed.

Our goal for the eBay auction was to net $200 in profit. We blew that goal away and made over $400 in net profit!

Happy New Year!

Karly
Your Rich Family Ambassador