Disabled Student Auction
by H.L.
(Florida)
I am a disabled student, so my educational needs are more expensive than the average college student. Books and tuition these days are enough to bankrupt the average family, but add on the expenses of medication and other special needs and my family needed desperately to raise money for me to attend college. We were able to cover the bulk of my fees with financial aid and a rather substantial scholarship, but we found ourself approximately two hundred dollars short of our goal and no funds with which to supply it.
We chose to solve this conundrum by holding a special eBay auction. We had luckily received a PSP game console from a television show (the only thing we've won in my lifetime) and placed this up on the auction site for slightly under the normal asking price for the piece (under $100). The auction received a lot of attention not only because such a popular item was selling for cheap, but because we had placed a short but descriptive paragraph in the auction explaining exactly what the proceeds would go towards. Also, we made sure to place a subtitle on the auction naming it as a "Disabled Student Fundraiser" and made certain that the picture and description of the PSP were as high quality as possible.
We have discovered through years of using the auction site that a well-worded and grammatically correct auction is always more likely to sell. Taking the time to take a decent, well-lit picture of the object you're selling and describing it in great detail helps to assure the buyer that they will be receiving exactly what they want. A little extra effort can show the buyer that you are a professional, and in a forum where you deal with strangers, consumers will gravitate towards those who seem to know what they're doing.
Using these tactics, and through the generosity of the eBay community, we exceeded our needed goal of two hundred dollars with the sale and I'm now a proud college student.