Anglican Church Chapel Sells on eBay

In our continuing series of unusual auctions on eBay, the latest piece of news is about an Anglican Church chapel that has been sold in the US. In itself, that is not very strange since the sale of homes and other buildings on eBay is increasing in popularity.

But what is unusual is that the chapel is being physically moved across the country. The move began around two years ago when a developer based in Copper Basin won an auction to buy the chapel at Ituna, Saskatchewan, Canada. The property went for $9,000.

Built in 1910, the Anglican Church chapel was originally owned by a railroad company but had been closed since around 1990. The purchase price included a church organ dating from 1911 along with sacraments, a stove, pews and other religious items.

Construction workers travelled from Wisconsin to begin dismantling the building, with carefully marked sections being loaded onto flatbed trucks and driven south, where reassembly is now underway.

Commenting on his reasons for buying the chapel, the developer is quoted as saying, "There is so much in Arizona that's new and so little that has the history and roots that you have back East."

Application Development Tips for eBay Shops & Sellers

As the eBay global community matures, one of the key things we have noticed is increasing competition in the "internal" eBay marketplace.

This growing competition is happening as a result of rapid increases in the number of sellers in both the domestic market and also on an international basis.

In recent months, eBay has focussed much attention on building its' online auction business in developing economies such as India and China, with the result that sellers of low cost products from these countries are now readily able to promote their items through eBay to the US, UK and Europe.

One of the things that can be done to make your eBay shop or eBay website stand out from the crowd is to develop a unique "look and feel" to your “piece of eBay territory”. Many eBay shops now also have their own independent websites and sell goods through these using eBay as a "gateway".

You need to be careful not to infringe any eBay rules about "off-eBay" trading, but building your own website that operates in harmony with your eBay shop (and also promotes your eBay shop) is something that many people have started to do.

So - we thought it might be useful for fellow eBayers if we published some methods and guidelines that are used by major commercial enterprises when conceiving, building and operating their own websites. Our team here has been leading and project-managing major web-enabled IT developments for many years using both local resources and offshore software development in India, which massively reduces costs.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be publishing articles on Rapid Application Development, Managing your Project, Development Processes, Quality Control and getting the Website Application up and running safely and securely.

For small website development projects that most eBay shops and sellers might want to undertake, it’s not really necessary to stick rigidly to all the methods and techniques detailed in these papers. But they are a good source of tips and hints used by the “big boys”. We hope they will be useful to fellow eBayers!

Hurricane Katrina – American Red Cross Fundraising

Dear fellow eBayer,

Victims of Hurricane Katrina are attempting to recover from the massive storm that recently caused havoc in the Mid-Atlantic States.
American Red Cross volunteers have been deployed to the hardest hit areas of Katrina's destruction, supplying hundreds of thousands of victims left homeless with critical necessities.

By placing the Red Cross banners and links on our site, we are helping to raise funds for Hurricane 2005 Relief. These funds will help the Red Cross provide shelter, food, counselling and other assistance to those in need. Please note that we do not receive any compensation for funds raised through this initiative. Please note also that this program will close in approximately the middle of October

All donation links are directed to Convio (rather than redcross.org). The reason for this is that Convio is the official partner for the American Red Cross - National Headquarters Online Giving Program. Due to high volumes of traffic and the need for American Red Cross partner sites, SSL certificates were unable to be obtained in a quick enough manner due to disaster response priorities.

In order to assure that Convio is indeed a partner of American Red Cross, you can go to the American Red Cross homepage at www.redcross.org to see a listing of all valid donation sites. This listing includes: Convio, Yahoo, MSN, Amazon, and iTunes.

Thank you for your help

eBay Shops Stock-up Early for Christmas

eBay Shops Stock-up Early for Christmas

According to the world’s largest online auction – eBay - last September, Playstation 2 consoles were selling on its auctions for under £100. But closer to Christmas, when stocks at high street shops were running out, the same items on eBay increased in price to almost £250, showing a 250% profit for eBay sellers.

So this year, Ebay is advising traders to buy stocks early and resell them at online auctions during the build-up to Christmas in anticipation of retail outlets running out of stock during the pre-Christmas rush.

eBay spokesperson, Charlie Coney, is reported as saying, "There are lots of exciting present ideas already in the shops and they will soon start to appear on both eBay and Dear Santa lists. Nobody knows what will be the Christmas number 1 best seller, but you can have a pretty good guess.”

So what will be the toys to focus on? Well, according to eBay they are……….V2 Robosapien; Xbox 360; PlayStation Pocket – PSP; Furby; Amazing Amanda; Star Wars Electronic Lightsaber; Tamagotchi Connexion; Rock Angels Bratz; Monopoly 70th Anniversary Here & Now Limited Edition and The Da Vinci Code board game.