A long time ago I used to make my living selling cars. Really, I just found cars people liked. They just happened to all be on my lot.

In my formative retail automotive career I worked at a small Nissan dealership that sold about 100 cars per month. For car dealerships, this isn’t big. But where I staked my claim was advertising and marketing vehicles on the internet. You noticed I didn’t say that I didn’t sell cars over the internet, because that never happened. People never actually bought the car over the internet, really, because they still wanted to touch it before they dropped a wad of cash (or tried for financing, as is most often the case). And I don’t blame them.

Never, that is, until the owner of the Nissan dealership I worked at approached me with a question. See, his neighbor (certainly not my neighbor) had too many Ferraris in his garage and the economy was tough. This was 2008 when the market had really hit bottom. His neighbor was a builder of luxury homes and, well, that market had stalled, too. So he needed to free up some cash in the form of a year old Ferrari F430 Spyder. It was a Scuderia with a lot of optional features, and the car had been custom-built just for him. It turns out you can’t just buy a Ferrari. You need to own a Ferrari, then order one and that’s what he had done. So losing one out of his collection was a big deal. It meant those years of waiting to be able to own more than one Ferrari, and then enjoying that Ferrari were gone.

He had only put a little under 500 miles on the car in the year he’d had it. For a while now, actually, he had planned to sell it. There is some rule about not being able to sell a Ferrari private party before you’ve owned it at least a year. Lots of rules on owning these cars.

Anyways, he didn’t really know how to sell a $250,000 car without having God knows who show up at his house to look at it, low-lifes calling wanting to drive it, etc. So he turned to his car dealer neighbor; who then turned to the best guy he knew who could sell a car via the internet.

Now, I had never sold such an expensive car before. But I had used eBay to sell a lot of things over the years, cars included. And thought for a very specialized item like a basically new Ferrari worth a quarter million dollars, eBay would be the best avenue. But in a cruddy economy and such a large ticket item, would it sell for what this guy was asking — or even sell it all? He offered me commission for the sale, or a flat fee for getting it out there and dealing with the inquiries if there were any. I took the flat. Hey, at least that was guaranteed money. I had no idea if this car would even get a real offer, much less even sell!

But I gave it my best effort and went to his house to not only photograph, but video this amazing Italian super car. I knew that it would take undone effort to sell a car worth so much money… AND to catch the attention of people looking for Ferraris, to buy this one over the other ones listed online at the time.

Unfortunately, the eBay listing I did has long since expired, so you can’t look at the custom listing page I made for this car. But it was no doubt a testament to the ability to pull every trick out of my hat as far as HTML coding on the listing page, sharp picture-taking (which can be difficult with cars), and the added video which basically no other car had at the time that was listed online. Looking back on the video seven years later I definitely know that I could do an even better job today. Then, high-definition cameras and the ability to upload HD video to YouTube was very limited. However, I evidently hit the nail on the head with the listing because the car sold for the seller’s asking price within 7 days. I did not have to relist or try other methods, one post to eBay was all it took!

That’s probably one of the more exciting aspects of selling this car. Was knowing that I could sell a quarter of a million dollar car online, on eBay, in the worst economy, and do so on the first try. Plus, I got to ride in a REALLY cool car!

Cheers!