E-sales rev up parts shops

Twenty years ago, when Keith Raschko started pulling parts from busted motorcycles junked at Independent Cycle, some of those widgets were only worth their weight in carbon.

But time and the Internet have turned those parts into diamonds, and Raschko now has a brisk eBay business where he has sold almost 12,000 items in the past five years. And he’s not alone.

“It’s taken over. It’s true,” Raschko said of his of his eBay sales. “It’s equivalent to what we used to do over the phone.”

The information superhighway is doing for local auto junkers what Interstate 90 has for decades done for Spalding Auto Parts, which became iconic from the half mile of I-90 guardrail that the salvage company occupies in Spokane Valley.

A ZIP code search of eBay auto parts auctions originating from the greater Spokane area reveals roughly a thousand occurring daily. There are cyber-sellers like Raschko, who has a couple hundred auctions occurring weekly, but also a smattering of small-timers selling junk pulled from backyard wrecks or Spalding’s itself. Some say even a thousand sales tracked down through a search by ZIP code and simple terminology like “auto parts” don’t tell the whole story.

“You could add another thousand or two to that number,” said Matt McCullough, who a couple of years ago traded a well-paying government job for one selling used auto parts on eBay. The cyber-seller said he can pull in $1,000 to $2,000 a week by conducting 100 or more auctions at a time. He pulls most of what he sells from different Northwest junkyards, but mostly Spalding’s, which he visits daily, ratchet in hand.

EBay even offers medical insurance to high-volume sellers. One of McCullough’s goals is to qualify.

A 2005 AC Nielson survey of eBay sellers estimated that, like McCullough, 724,000 people rely on eBay as their secondary or sole source of income. On the other end of the virtual checkout counter, eBay reported, were 157.3 million registered users worldwide, each a would-be merchant or customer.

Raschko said some of his best customers are in Japan, where laws regulating the size of motorcycle engines can make parts from the motorcycles exported to the United States a good resale item. Raschko and his wife, Janice, hold a couple hundred auctions weekly. What doesn’t sell at auction is routed to their online eBay “store” where people can peruse the cyber aisles and buy straight up without bidding. It takes the Raschkos, plus two employees, pulling, posting, boxing and shipping just to keep up with sales, said Keith Raschko.

Another reason Japan is so full of cyber-shoppers, said seller John Waters, is because tight pollution standards force older vehicles out of commission at roughly 30,000 to 60,000 miles. Those engines are then exported to the United States for resale, leaving few older parts available on the Japan market.

There was no shortage of Japanese motorcycle parts in Hillyard where Waters grew up. As a boy, he would fix a motorcycle then trade it for two broken ones, repair those and trade each for two more. Waters had a motorcycle graveyard going on in his front yard by the time he was an adult, married and having kids of his own.

“My wife told me it was like I was the cycle reaper,” explained Waters. The nickname became his business handle a couple years ago when he started selling his parts trove on eBay to offset his monthly day care bills of $800 to $1,300.

Last year, Waters and his wife did the math and concluded they’d be better off if he quit his heating and air conditioning job and just stayed home with the kids selling parts online full time. He set up shop in a 75-year-old garage behind their home north of Spokane, where he installed a woodstove and a high-speed Internet line. His main concern isn’t that he’ll run out of work but rather that he won’t know when to stop.

“You have to be careful,” said Waters. “Yesterday I started at 7 a.m., and I didn’t finish until midnight.”

Local auto parts sellers say it’s easy to put too much into an eBay sale and end up earning little, if anything on a sale. eBay’s cut on each sale is 15 percent, Raschko said. PayPal, an eBay banker that offers secure transactions, receives another 5 percent of a seller’s profit. Those two cuts on a $10 item don’t leave a seller much margin for error.

But a buyer can also buy every item a seller has to offer, said Erik Smith, who sells parts as a side business to his home-based mechanics job and does quite well.

“This week alone I’ve got stuff going to Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri,” said Smith. “I started it as a side job to make money for my kids’ school costs, and it turned into a growing business.”

Smith does eBay business under the name “e-specialized” and sells parts mostly pulled from Spalding’s. He recently started “r-specialized.” Named after Smith’s son, Robert, the second cyber shop sells rearview mirrors exclusively. The father said he hopes to turn the business over to Robert when the boy enters middle school.