Entrepreneurs profit on EBay

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Andrew Green was riding the Internet to success in the 1990s as vice president of operations for an e-commerce business in Washington.

When the company folded after the dot-com bubble burst, "I found myself unemployed in the midst of the dot-com meltdown," Mr. Green said.

He decided to use his dot-com experience to start a business on Internet auction site EBay.

From a start in his Silver Spring home, where he used his basement as a warehouse, his enterprise is now on track to bring in $2 million to $3 million in revenue this year. About two-thirds of his sales come from the online auction site.

He joins 724,000 Americans who earn primary or secondary incomes from EBay's marketplace -- up 68 percent from more than 430,000 in 2004, according to a recent ACNielsen survey.

About 15,600 of them operate in the Washington area. Of those, 24 percent have retired early or quit their jobs to sell full-time on EBay, according to ACNielsen.

A larger number of Washington-area residents, or about 142,000, are occasional EBay sellers.

Mr. Green's business, Taxi Market, primarily sells telescopes, microscopes, office furniture, glow sticks and art objects. Other items that sell well are consumer electronics, antiques, jewelry and automobile parts.

"I started selling on EBay because the level of sophistication of competitors was pretty low at the time, and I felt that my experience with e-commerce best practices gave me a decent head start," Mr. Green said. "That was 3 years ago. Things are different now. In virtually every product category, sellers face competition from increasingly savvy e-commerce and EBay experts."

EBay's growing sophistication showed in its second-quarter net income, which increased 53 percent from one year ago to $291.6 million, prompting the stock value to soar 21 percent the day after the earnings report.