Melissa Wicker likes to shop for her friends. And she has a lot of friends--nearly 8 million, at last count. Of course, the word friend is used loosely these days, in an era when e-mail establishes instant intimacy between total strangers separated by thousands of miles. So it's no surprise that Wicker, 46, an assistant district attorney in Isle of Palms, S.C., hasn't met many of her new friends in the flesh. But they're on her mind when she cruises clothing stores and comes upon a tantalizing markdown in designer duds. She buys by the armful, goes home to her computer and within a couple of days has set up her own fashion show--on eBay, in full view of anyone with a modem and a yen to bid on the clothes she puts up for auction. Bids race through cyberspace, winners are declared, and Wicker mails the goods to the lucky buyers--and cashes their money orders and cashier's checks, sometimes for a tidy profit and always with the thrill of a successful sale. "I've been waiting for eBay my whole life," she says.
And she has lots of company, among buyers and sellers alike. eBay makes a lot of people happy, and not just because it makes some people rich. The surprise--in more enthusiastic moments, you might even call it the miracle--of eBay is that it offers online consumers something rarer, more essential, more enduring than a chance to make a profit.
"Community" is an overworked term, too often applied artificially to any motley of people who share a skin color, an income level or a set of political bugaboos. But from the limitless ether of cyberspace, eBay has managed to conjure up the real thing. For many people, eBay does what communities have traditionally done. It not merely provides them financial sustenance but also draws them together with like-minded folk, offering encouragement, rewarding unique talents and interests, giving an outlet for their eccentricities and individuality and in some cases rescuing them from the margins where they would otherwise languish alone.
Consider Carol Sangster of Edmonton, Canada, who seven years ago had to quit her job as an engineering clerk at Canadian National Railways because she was struggling with systemic lupus and diabetes. For several years, she fought for her life. In time she partially recovered. "I became well enough to be bored," she says. Then, 18 months ago, she discovered eBay.
In their travels over the years, she and her husband had acquired acres of stuff. She started posting lots of it for auction. When she was well enough, she began attending public auctions and buying up lots. Today she tests her strength, challenging herself with eBay, working as much as her illness allows. "For me," she says, "it wasn't the sale. It was being part of something again. It was the contact with people. I guess I used it to make me feel better."