Cash is usually the easiest and fastest way to help a charity. Sometimes, though, well-meaning donors offer the contents of their basements and attics, which can lead nonprofit managers to ask:
What are we supposed to do with a slightly scratched cellphone?
Or a collection of golf clubs?
Or a plastic statue of Yoda?
Selling them on eBay, the Internet's largest and most successful auction Web site, is an easy answer, but it's deceptively tricky.
Nonprofits don't often have the time or expertise to organize, catalog and ship their unwanted items to buyers.
There are “trading assistants” who will help, professional sellers who sell items on eBay on behalf of owners for a hefty commission — frequently between 20 percent and 40 percent. But there are few companies that focus on providing the service for nonprofits.
Into the void comes eWired Auctions LLC, the brainchild of two Union College undergraduates who plan to use eBay to sell items donated to nonprofits that the groups could not otherwise use.
The company, comprised of four people, is based at the U-Start Business Incubator in Schenectady.
Brian Selchick, 21, is eWired Auction's founder. The Menands native said the idea came to him while he recuperated from a long illness during his sophomore year. As he recovered, he began buying and selling college textbooks and unwanted videos on eBay.
Selchick said he always had a head for business — he earned a real estate license at 18 — but he also has many hours of volunteer work on his resume. While still in high school, he led a fund-raising campaign for the Latham-based Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York.
He calls his current project “moral entrepreneurship.”
“Yes, we're going to take a profit off this, but the main reason we're doing it is to help the nonprofits out there,” said Selchick, who plans to attend law school after he receives a history degree next year.
Instead of charging a commission, eWired will charge an annual subscription fee to the groups it works with, Selchick said.
The company — formed in September with partner Evan Gouzie and investor Robert Kristel — is just getting started. Because of Selchick's earlier volunteer connection, the Regional Food Bank has signed on as eWired's first client.
Mark Quandt, executive director of the food bank, which collects donations from the food industry and distributes them to charitable agencies in 23 counties, said he hoped eWired's services will be an incentive for people to give items they planned to otherwise throw away, now that they know the proceeds will go to a charity. The service also is useful when a truly odd item comes in.
A few years ago, he said, Yoda came into his life and wouldn't leave. A well-meaning donor gave the food bank a plastic statue of the green character from the “Star Wars” movies that stood several feet high.
“It was obviously of value to someone, but not to us. It sat in my office for a while,” Quandt said. Eventually, the food bank sold the Jedi master, but it would have been easier to let a third party take care of it, he said.
EWired isn't the only local company with a business plan that involves eBay. It is estimated thousands of people are so-called “power sellers,” who derive a chunk of their monthly income through sales on the auction site. EBay doesn't release figures on how many members are power sellers or where they live.
But they include Capital Region entrepreneurs like Tom Golding. The Colonie resident has sold tie-dyed T-shirts as PJL Distributors since 1988. He began selling shirts on eBay last year, and those sales now account for a small part of his business: 75 to 150 shirts a month.
“The thing that's surprising is where you are getting orders from,” he said. “Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and that was just recently. … It's small, but I think there's a lot of potential there,” he said.