The Toronto Star, Oct. 30, 2001
BY MICHAEL DOJC

It's 9 o'clock on a Saturday morning and 100 or so people are milling about, anxiously sipping on complimentary soft drinks and periodically checking their watches.

I'm in the basement of the Metro Convention Centre a half-hour before eBay University's first class outside of the United States and the mood is first-day-of-school tense.

The crowd ranges from 20-something college students to salt-and-pepper-haired retirees. Most are alone and carry clipboards under their arms, which they tuck away into the black knapsacks that eBay's representatives were giving out at the registration booth.

The travelling lecture series has been criss-crossing the United States for just more than a year, making weekend stops in places like Salt Lake City, Cincinnati and Minneapolis.

Following the Toronto stop, eBay U heads to Kansas City, then Los Angeles and then Pittsburgh. With a worldwide trading community of 34 million users, eBay won't run out of cities to visit anytime soon.

Like most people here, I received an e-mail advertising the event and felt the $25 registration fee was a reasonable price to pay to be turned into a "lean, mean selling machine," as the itinerary description put it.

"Primarily, people come because they've either dabbled in or they've done a bit of trading on eBay and now they really want to bring it to the next level," explains Lorna Borenstein, general manager of eBay Canada.

"They want to know more about how to make money," she adds. This may explain the lack of socializing that is going on; so far, eBay U seems as serious as a Leonard Cohen song -- but that will soon change.

The faculty here knows how to work a crowd.

"Don't I look like everybody's uncle?" asks Jim Griffith, 47, one of the company's first-ever customer service representatives. He joined eBay in 1996. "Griff," as he likes to be called, is wearing a festive forest-green shirt with bright red suspenders, and he's a dead-ringer for Santa Claus. The room is smiling before he even opens his mouth.

Griff's seminar is on improving auction listings using photos and HTML (the basic programming language of the Internet). As tech-heavy a subject as this may sound, Griff manages to turn the lecture into a Dame Edna-style comedy routine, though it's hard to tell if some of his jokes aren't planted.

During a demonstration, a cellphone that had been donated as a prop by a woman in the third row starts to ring. Everybody breaks into hysterical laughter as Griff picks it up and starts chatting to the mystery person on the other end. "That was a Bridget-Jones type moment!" he says, handing the phone back to its owner. "Her mom said, `And who are you so early in the morning?'"

Later, a dark-haired woman raises her hand and says that a friend told her not to sell items on eBay.ca (which was launched in April, 2000) because they have a better chance of selling on the original eBay site (http://www.ebay.com). A few people nod their heads in agreement, but Griff explains that the chances of a sale are actually increased by listing on eBay.ca because the listing will be available both regionally and globally if desired. "Doesn't anybody have any Canadian pride?" he asks spiritedly, trying to get a rise out of the patriots in the room.

By lunch, everybody is talking eBay. Moez Ladha, 26, who runs a cellphone accessory business and uses eBay to boost sales, is having a conversation with Heidi Goertz, 34, who sells porcelain dolls. They've found common ground talking about the difficulties of competing with U.S.-based sellers.

I interrupt to ask Ladha what his user rating is. The number is often a source of pride among eBayers; it's a performance gauge that refers to the amount of praise a user has received from successful transactions. He tells me his rating is 256, though he assures me that it should really be something like 1,400.

"Nobody ever leaves positive feedback any more," pipes up Goertz in sympathy.

The conversation is a live version of eBay's "community," which grows as online relationships are forged between buyers and sellers in places like the site's main chat room, the eBay Cafe, where the only rule is no business.

So what do they chat about in the cafe if they can't talk about eBay?

"In most cases they talk about their families, their jobs and funny things that have happened to them. They also talk about areas of interest in collecting," Griff says in a one-on-one conversation outside of class.

After lunch, I head to the Advanced Selling Tips seminar, taught by Marsha Collier, co-author of eBay For Dummies and the upcoming Dummies book Starting An eBay Business.

While Collier is short on shtick, she's full of useful tips to improve sellers' results: Scope out closed auctions in your categories to determine the date and time when the highest prices are reached, then capitalize on the info by starting your auctions at that time. Search for misspellings (Gordie How, Guchi) to find great bargains for re-selling. Refrain from using irrelevant words that are never searched for like "rare" or "l@@k!"

I came to eBay U as a casual fan of the online auctioneer with a not-too-shabby 131 user rating built up over four years of buying and selling old magazines and baseball cards. I left with a bag full of tricks that I may just share with the neighbourhood on Halloween. ------------------------------------------------------------------------