Selling 800 numbers on Ebay
You may have seen toll free numbers listed on ebay. There have actually been over 1.7 million dollars worth of toll free numbers put up on ebay in just the last four months. (see full list) There are a number of legal issues related to that which I’m really not trying to get into at the moment. I’m not promoting that nor am I discouraging this. But I’ve been watching the listings and gathering some information from all of the ebay listings for toll free numbers listed for over $1000 (and a few slightly less). I figured that this may be helpful for visitors, at least as far as knowing what other people value their own numbers at.
I should probably also start by saying that I don’t think ebay is a particularly good vehicle for selling numbers alone, because an auction requires multiple people interested in an item at one time. And most numbers only appeal really well to a narrow niche or industry. How many optometrists (for example) that are interested in a toll free number are going to wander through at any one time?
Some are listed with buy it now, some just have an opening bid and some aren’t auctions, they’re just listings. The one thing that all of these items has in common is that there are almost no bids and none that I could find that sold. I didn’t usually find them and make the screen capture at the end of the auction but that really didn’t matter because they almost never sell. The hard part was remembering which ones I had already looked at when they were relisted, some quite often. That doesn’t mean their owners didn’t get any benefit from the listing. Some may sell afterwards for much more reasonable fee. Some might wind up doing something else for a different number too.
Some were selling domain names or even functioning businesses. My suggestion for anyone trying to sell a number through ebay would be to promote it as much as possible outside of ebay, especially if their number has a specific target market. Look for an industry journal or convention for example. Use that in conjunction with a PR campaign to drive interested parties to your ebay auction.
I even took the research one step further and looked up the resporg history of those numbers. I was surprised to see some auctions for numbers in disconnect and for numbers that nobody appeared to even control. I was even surprised to notice that some of the numbers being auctioned were actually numbers that I had gotten for customers. I do NOT encourage or promote that at all. It was only a few, but I guess that shows that our fees which are based on the time and effort required to get a number are often way below the value of the number, which I guess is a good thing.
My ebay name is TollFreeNumbers probably because I’ve used ebay longer than most of these sellers. But I don’t do not buy or sell numbers on or off ebay. We only charge a standard one time Search Fee based on the time and effort typically required. Maybe I’m missing out! I have always watched what’s going on here at ebay and I thought that some of my visitors on the web might like to see what’s going on ebay with toll free numbers lately too.
Please let me know what experience you’ve had if any with ebay. (You can post totally anonymously)
