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Barely a week goes by without a story about the latest outlandish items sold on the online auction site Ebay. In recent months, Tranmere Rovers Football Club was put up on the site with a starting price of $10m by the US company entrusted with selling the club, much to the embarrassment of its owners, and a woman recently sold her husband’s Los Angeles crypt on Ebay for $4.6m owing to its proximity to that of Marilyn Monroe.
It’s all a long way from a broken laser pointer – the first item auctioned by Pierre Omidyar after he had written the code for the site in 1995. And while Ebay has become professionalised – there are now nearly 200,000 people earning a primary or secondary living or running a business on the ebay.co.uk site alone – there are still plenty of people who go there to peddle unwanted items from dusty attics and cupboards, or search for hidden gems among the cast-offs of other “Ebayers”. It’s for this reason that Ebay is cited as a global online flea market, whose real-world equivalent is generally seen to be slowly disappearing. But how accurate is the comparison?
The first flea market in name is thought to be Paris’s Marché aux Puces. This was gradually developed into a cohesive if chaotic unit by the Parisian equivalent of rag and bone men around the Porte de Clignancourt, between the French capital and the town of St Ouen, in the late 19th century. With its 3,000 stalls the market is a rare, still thriving example of its kind.
Visiting the Marché aux Puces is an extraordinary, often disorientating experience, due to the dizzying array of stuff to buy – a quality Ebay certainly shares. The look of Ebay has always been at the flea-markety end of web design, too, which is somehow reassuring. It’s also a more democratic model of commerce, giving more power to the buyer, who is less prone to being intimidated online than in a face-to-face encounter. It is a highly useful resource for the budget collector, with everything from decorative objects and clothing to cars and computers. And, despite the presence of other sites like eBid.net, and Amazon’s increasing volume of used goods, Ebay dominates this online industry.
There are costs and risks involved, of course. Some users forget to factor in postage when bidding, which can push items beyond what you were prepared to pay. And there is the thrill of the chase, which can inflate prices – a 2008 New York University study found that the fear of losing an auction contributed to a distortion of the potential worth of an item. And a 2006 paper from Stanford and Berkeley universities found that where items were available on Ebay, both at a fixed price and in an auction format, 43 per cent of auctions ended at prices above the fixed price.
Luck is also involved. You many find yourself bidding against a determined fellow collector (a memorable episode of the BBC comedy Psychoville satirised this with a bidding war over a rare Beanie Baby toy that reached £9,000), but equally, you can happen upon a valuable item that has gone almost unnoticed.
To explore Ebay’s effectiveness as an online flea market, I took into account my family’s modest areas of collecting, set a price limit of £200 and looked at recently completed auctions. My wife, an artist, has already used the site to explore her interest in stereoscopes, essentially early 3D glasses invented in the 1840s. She bought a late Victorian stereoviewer recently on Ebay for under £70, which came with a book of stereocards illustrating the life of Christ, containing atmospheric images of Palestine around 1900. My wife’s interest has now turned to magic lanterns, the ancestors of the slide projector, which were common in the travelling phantasmagorias of the 18th century: Victorian and early 20th-century versions of these lanterns can be snapped up on Ebay for as little as £50 but one in very good condition recently sold for £2,400.
A more humble object is the buttonhook, which was used to help fasten shoes and clothes, widespread from the 1880s onwards. My mother has steadily built up a small collection of these fork-sized hooks, and among the most eye-catching on Ebay is a turn-of-the-century item, likely from Birmingham, whose silver handle ends in a snarling wild cat’s head. It recently sold on Ebay for £45 – though similar, smaller items have sold for £25. Buttonhook collectors are exactly the kind to benefit from Ebay’s existence. Where previously you might find a single item after trawling through endless market stalls, or occasionally encounter a group in an antique shop, now there is an abundance on Ebay, and their prices are necessarily competitive.
With objects such as antique clocks, however, you are confronted with Ebay at its most overwhelmingly sprawling. While many can be had for almost nothing, there is also a huge number of more costly examples. You can use the helpful “completed listings” function, which allows you to see lots that have closed, either with a sale or with no bids at all. Likewise, you can observe bidders and identify a likely expert or professional by looking at the number of successful bids that they have made for items in similar areas, and that way ascertain an object’s value. On this evidence, a mid-19th-century French Japy Frères mantle clock, which sold for £185 recently after a mini bidding war between two collectors, seems like the kind of thing to go for.
Yet the 4,000 antique clocks on ebay.co.uk are dwarfed by the music memorabilia section, with its 150,000 items. The volume of Rolling Stones material, for instance, is astonishing, from early programmes to a terrible portrait of Keith Richards. Many of the choicest items are autographed objects such as the more obvious LPs and 45s, but there are also unusual lots such as Charlie Watts’ signed drum head, or an acoustic guitar signed by the underrated former Stone Mick Taylor.
In my own area of particular interest, modern and contemporary art, the best recent lot available was a screenprint by pop artist Joe Tilson, “1/2 Ziggurat” (1965). One of an edition of 70, from which another print is in the Tate Collection, it sold for £180 with some small defects, which is not a bad price for a notable artist. Meanwhile, my search for a Matisse drawing that had lurked in a Parisian attic, dismissed as a childlike doodle, was sadly fruitless.
The Ebay experience is not unlike a flea market visit – wading through endless tat in search of a gem. But, while it contains richer options than a physical market ever could, I wonder if its immensity and scope is actually self-defeating. Its millions of users prove Ebay’s success, but as I was searching through its endless pages of horrible digital snaps, I began to pine for the atmosphere, the sounds and sights of the real flea markets. My thoughts turned again to the Marché aux Puces, and I began to consider whether my best online investment might be a ticket for Eurostar.
