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Sellers' Market the place for online consignments

By Mark Langlois
Danbury News-Times
January 16, 2003

DANBURY — Remember those floating pens kids buy at the Statue of Liberty or Alcatraz, the ones with a tiny ship or a saint inside the top that slides back and forth as you tilt the pen?

Andrew Balbus of New Fairfield, a Harvard law school graduate, turned his hobby of collecting those pens into an online business.

Balbus collected the pens for years and then discovered a market for them on the Internet. He has since bought and sold thousands of pens for about $3 each. Sometimes a $3 pen can fetch as much as $25.

"You can go anywhere in the world and floating pens are about $3, except Brazil," Balbus said. "In Brazil, they’re about $12."

From his experiences as a pen collector, Balbus created Sellers' Market, an online business with a Danbury storefront. Basically, he uses the Internet to help his customers get the best price they can when selling an item. Sellers' Market is located at 72 Newtown Road in the Super Stop & Shop plaza.

"The depth of the online auction markets has gotten deeper and deeper. We can pretty much find a market for anything," Balbus said.

Here’s how it works. A customer brings in an object he or she wants to sell. Balbus photographs it, and writes up a detailed description of the object and its history. He and the customer sign a consignment agreement that says the seller will pay Balbus $8 immediately, and 25 percent of the sales price.

Balbus takes possession of the object. He stores it in the shop, which was originally a bank and then housed Weight Watchers.

The advantage of using his service is that you as the seller do not have to do any of the legwork. For instance, you don’t have to take a digital photo and then e-mail it to eBay. You don’t have to write the description, either, or deal with the e-mails from interested buyers or spend time answering their questions.

Sellers' Market is about a week old, and so far Balbus has hosted about 40 auctions.

He hasn’t been asked to sell a car or a boat yet, but he is preparing for that event. He hopes that taking a picture and the title will be enough. He isn’t certain he has enough room in the shop for a car.

"I’m an online auction, so we have to have physical possession of the item," said Balbus, who has been selling things online for more than three years. "I can’t have somebody say, ‘Oh that? I sold that myself yesterday.’"

Do that a few times in the Internet auction business and a company earns a bad reputation. Nobody bids on items from a person who has a history of not delivering.

"It sounds like a viable business to me," said Alex Delucia, founder of Yankee Peddler & Pawn, 139 Main St. Delucia has used the Internet to sell items at auction for customers.

"He’s picked a good location, and he’s right about taking possession of the item for sale. Offering something for auction that you don’t have will hurt your business on eBay big time."

Delucia said the business of selling used items is more crowded today than it was 10 years ago when he opened shop. More stores sell used computer games, used music CDs, used jewelry and used sporting goods.

"I’d recommend it to anyone," said Glenn Moore of New Fairfield, who sold a Nikonos underwater camera through Sellers' Market.

Moore said he bought the camera to use in Australia, and after doing that, it languished in his attic for 16 years. He bought it for about $500, and he sold it recently for about $300.

"You know when you have something and you keep it thinking you’ll get back to it someday," Moore said. "That someday never came."

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