I’ve gotten a few emails over the last few months implying that our eBay Roundups are somehow crooked, have paid placements or are the result of some sort of cronyism. I’m not sure where these folks have gotten this idea (one guy said he read it on Reddit?), but it’s baloney. I really care about our editorial and advertising policies, so I thought I’d explain quickly how we do what we do.
I (Jesse) find most of the stuff in the roundups, and Derek contributes a fair amount as well. Pete throws something in every once in a while.
Both Derek and I have a huge list of saved searches and sellers. I literally have about 500 saved search terms in my RSS reader, which generate a couple thousand items a day. I also sometimes browse the stores of sellers I’ve saved, and periodically spend some time browsing in the vintage section looking for unique, cool stuff. Derek’s process is pretty similar. So that’s where the stuff comes from.
None of our listings are paid.
We do sometimes include our own auctions, which we always mention are ours. Neither of us is a pro at this, we just use eBay to clear our closets once in a while.
We do use eBay affiliate links, which we added a few months after we started doing the roundups.
If you notice relatively more from a particularly store or seller, it isn’t because we’re in cahoots with them or anything, it’s just because they have a lot of particularly good stuff.
In summary:
We work super hard to find cool stuff for the roundups. Unique, unusual, wonderful stuff with low starting prices and buy-it-now prices. I think it’s a really cool feature of the blog. We wouldn’t compromise it by being shady.
OK? OK.
Oh: and if you wish less people saw our links, another issue we hear about sometimes, you can always join the Inside Track and for a dollar get a weekly list of links that’s seen by about .3% of the people who see the ones on the blog. That’s actual, I just did the math.