You can find everything on EBay from a Learjet to a velvet painting of Elvis. But Jay and Marie Senese have found something far more rare on the auction site: a new way of life.
EBay Inc. has afforded the husband-and-wife entrepreneur team the chance to earn a living selling CDs from their Sierra Madre home. They wrote a business plan, found sources for the more than 5,000 used CDs they put up for bid weekly, worked out the considerable logistics for handling their auctions and hired two full-time employees and several part-timers. The Seneses report to no one.
If only they could take a day off.
The couple's operation, known as 1 Cent CD, is by far the most successful home-based business operating on EBay, as measured by volume of merchandise.
But like thousands of other full-time EBay merchants, the Seneses have discovered one of the great ironies of the Internet: The 21st century technology that has enabled them to run a business from home also has trapped them in an 18th century, work-consuming lifestyle reminiscent of farmers tied to their land or shopkeepers who lived above the store.
This autumn afternoon in the Senese living room is typical. Marie Senese, 42, sits at a retro-style Formica table set up in front of the television. Stacked on the table and spilling onto the floor are 37 plastic trays, each holding 20 CDs. She picks up and types in the information that will be listed on EBay when the disc is put up for auction.
Then she picks up another and another.
"It's like having your own shop, except at the end of the day you don't get to go home," she said. "You're already there. And so is the work."
Every day -- including weekends -- the Seneses put 800 used CDs up for bid. Nearly all will be sold five days later, when the auctions end.
They begin the workday just after dawn and often don't finish until midnight. Weekends, when they are without their paid staff, are worse. Since founding 1 Cent CD three years ago, they have taken exactly four vacation days, and even then they took their laptop along.
"It gets weary," said Marie Senese.
'Global From Day One'
With the advent of EBay, launching a business seems seductively easy. There are no bricks-and-mortar storefronts to rent, no distribution channels to create, no marketing campaigns to launch, not even an Internet domain name to register.
