My Ebay Business– L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven– Part 1

Hi Every­one.

As I’m sure by now, any­one read­ing Fanboy@50 real­izes that I run a Ebay Home Based Busi­ness called L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven, and I thought it was high time I gave every­one a lit­tle bit of back­ground about my business…

I started my busi­ness, L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven four years ago on Ebay.…but anime fig­ures and anime in gen­eral was not what the business’s orig­i­nal direc­tion was aimed toward…nor was it called ” anime otaku heaven “…

In the sum­mer of 2003, around my birth­day to be exact, myself and my friend Ken decided that we could do things bet­ter than the local hobby shop where we were buy­ing magic cards from ( and I was pur­chas­ing my comics from at the time ) and so we launched our Ebay busi­ness which was called…L&K’S Col­lectible Cards and Comics…get it…Lew and Ken…I thought it was a good busi­ness name.

Orig­i­nally we had decided to con­cen­trate solely on used comics ( which of course were my fin­ished read­ings ) and deal in Magic the Gath­er­ing, CCG ( Col­lectible Card Game )cards, which of course we were inti­mately famil­iar with due to our actu­ally play­ing the game.

The ini­tial first year of this busi­ness was a learn­ing expe­ri­ence for the both of us, and since we were basi­cally a two man oper­a­tion, the chores of run­ning the busi­ness at the time were split between the both of us, as far as list­ing items and fol­low­ing thru with the ship­ping of items pur­chased to our cus­tomers. Of course in the first year, we really made no profit, as we were both learn­ing the in’s and out’s of Ebay’s structure…and by struc­ture I mean all the fee’s that were asso­ci­ated with run­ning an online Ebay busi­ness which included at the time…

• list­ing fees
• store fees
• final value fees

these were just the Ebay fees back than, Paypal’s fees for trans­ac­tions processed were a sep­a­rate entity at that time, and were deducted after some­one paid for an item.

This is how Pay­pal still works today, the only dif­fer­ence between than and now is the fact that Pay­pal is now just another Ebay asset/ acqui­si­tion, so basi­cally this is just another Ebay fee, that goes into Ebay’s coif­fures if you will.

In year two, we decided to expand the busi­ness into Minia­tures gam­ing which included Hero Clix and ( at the time I thought was just a pass­ing fad ) Mage Knight fig­ures from a com­pany called Wiz Kids Games.

We also decided to include the Lord of the rings CCG game, pro­duced by Deci­pher games ( I should say that this was more a deci­sion based on the fact that the first movie was being released at about this time ) rather than how pop­u­lar this game was at the time.

Another year of busi­ness passed by with out a lot of move­ment and at best lack­lus­ter sales.

I had decided in our third year, that I wanted to go beyond Ebay and our online presence…which due to our lack of avail­able fund­ing would neces­si­tate our hav­ing to boot­strap this end of the busi­ness or in other words we would have to pay cash out of our pock­ets for any­thing we wanted to do out­side of the net.

At this point we had another per­son work­ing with us, a friend who I’ve known ever since he was a kid, named Chris.

Year three was also the year I took more con­trol of the direc­tion that L&K would go in, and what we would aim for…in the area of NY State that we hap­pen to reside in, there were sev­eral ( at least two card shops that I was aware of ) that held CCG card tour­na­ments every once in a while, along with the local Toys R US in the town I hap­pen to live in.

The thing was only one of the two card shops were run­ning sanc­tioned tournaments..I won’t go into detail about run­ning sanc­tioned tour­na­ments at this time, but maybe I’ll talk about them in a future post…so we were going to start to run tournaments…Magic the Gath­er­ing tour­na­ments to be exact, and of course I wanted to make sure that they would be sanc­tioned tour­na­ments, so to that end I got in touch ( and not with­out a lot of prob­lems, due to the fact that we were not a brick and mor­tar shop ) with Wiz­ards of the Coast, the com­pany respon­si­ble for Magic, and found that we would have to get another card or comic spe­cial­ity shop to spon­sor us, so that we would be able to offer points to the play­ers that were involved in play­ing in any tour­na­ments that we ran. I also at this time got involved with a new card game from a com­pany called Upper Deck, the same com­pany that puts out all kinds of Sports Cards ( and now are respon­si­ble for the CCG Game, World of War­craft, based on the hugely pop­u­lar online game ) called the VS Sys­tem, which is based around comics book char­ac­ters from comic pub­lish­ers DC and Mar­vel respectivly.

I was so dri­ven to make these events a suc­cess, I even got myself sanc­tioned to be a judge in order to offi­ci­ate the VS Sys­tem tour­na­ments in particular.

So in the win­ter of 2005, we held our first tournament/ comic book and minia­tures event, this event would also include our first Hero Clix tour­na­ment, which would be sanc­tioned due to our hav­ing a judge who was expe­ri­enced in play­ing and judg­ing Hero Clix game tournaments.

There was just one prob­lem with our first event attempt…

First, we had done some adver­tis­ing, and hoped that the fact that we left flyer’s at some of the local comics shops would be enough to have par­ents bring their chil­dren to where the event was being held…

Sec­ond, and this was to be a major hurdle…was mother nature!

The sec­ond Sat­ur­day of the new year would bring to us an Ice and Snow storm…I know, Lew why sched­ule a tour­na­ment in that mess!

In my defense, I had been mak­ing all the plans for this first tour­na­ment, includ­ing get­ting the place to play, the local Howard John­sons, for $100 for the entire day, get­ting the magic cards and the vs cards that we would need for the day, mak­ing sure that what we charged would be enough to at least cover the cost of the cards them­selves, and hope­fully make some sales between hav­ing cards to offer and the minia­tures and of course the used comics ( which I might add were four full case boxes comics mind you! ) and of course every­thing had been paid for in advance. The only thing that I couldn’t plan for was the weather, and unfor­tu­nately every­thing had been set in motion so there would be no turn­ing back.

Need­less to say, mother nature kept most of the play­ers away, and the kids who did show up wound up com­ing to play in the Hero Clixs minia­tures tournament.

In the end, we wound up mak­ing enough cash to cover the cost of the Howard Johnson’s fee, and not much else, so we went home early that day. I was pretty dis­ap­pointed with the whole expe­ri­ence, and we went home with a ton of inven­tory that would have to be listed on Ebay to make up for what we had not made at the tournament.

The orig­i­nal plan was to have another event or two at best that would make up the rest of our push to go out­side of the Ebay store…in my excite­ment and drive to make the busi­ness grow ( and ulti­mately be able to leave a job that was slowly but most assuredly mak­ing me very sick on the inside ) I had decided to up the ante and sched­ule another two tournaments/sales events ( for lack of a bet­ter term ) that would take place by the end of June…my think­ing at this point was that we needed to try to have con­sis­tent events in order to draw peo­ple and make a name for L&K…so the next event was going to hap­pen in March of 2005, and would include every­thing that we had in the first dis­as­ter in January.

While this event went a bit bet­ter, and the weather was much nicer, it still was pretty much a sleeper, with some kids who were play­ing Magic, no one play­ing VS, and again the big win­ner for the day was Hero Clix.

We did bet­ter in the sales depart­ment this time around, but still went home with a lot of inven­tory to have to list on Ebay.

At this point, I was a bit frus­trated with how the event had done, and I was think­ing of just scrap­ping the idea of another event all together.

I mean, I was was start­ing to use my own credit cards to finance a lot of the expense involved with get­ting the stuff we needed to make these events hap­pen, and that was some­thing I did with­out hes­i­ta­tion, but it was not some­thing I would be able to do for another two or ( pos­si­bly depen­dant upon my des­per­a­tion at the job I hated ) three events.

And than one day in April of 2005, I had seen a com­mer­cial on tele­vi­sion for an item that would change my out­look on the busi­ness that ken and I had based on comics and card games…it was a DVD…for a film by the leg­endary Hayao Miyazaki…

The film was called Spir­ited Away…and I was!

end of part 1