Student Entrepreneur - Austen Allred (eBay Powerseller)

Austen Allred

At the age of 17, Austen Allred is already a successful serial entrepreneur. His first business involves selling event and play tickets on eBay, especially Wicked tickets, Wicked being a new musical. This business is a simple business based on the laws of supply and demand - brokers buy tickets at a retail price, but often sell them for more than three times the retail price. This is because they have to buy tickets six to seven months in advance - at this time the supply is high with a very low demand. The weeks before a show, the demand skyrockets as the supply plummets.

When I noticed this I decided to get into the business, particularly selling on eBay. I had already bought and sold products on eBay very frequently; so much that I hadn’t been into a retail store in about a year, and paid for all of my expenses without having a traditional “job”. I dug into some savings, and with my brother, bought a few pairs of tickets and resold them for great profits just a few months later.

Since then I have started another eBay business based on my love of soccer. I wanted to buy 50 soccer balls that I could shoot with at a practice field, so that I could spend less time chasing. I found that although the price for 50 was discounted, the price for 100 was much, much less. I bought 100 and sold 50 on eBay. I now do this more than I sell tickets, a simple buy-mark up-sell tactic. I have now achieved the rankings of eBay Powerseller, and can create enough sales to keep this ranking without selling any tickets. Once I start selling tickets again, I should climb up the Powerseller ladder fairly quickly.

I am looking to start selling tickets again as soon as I can obtain some capital so I can become an official “broker,” and pre-purchase tickets to traveling Broadway shows (other than Los Angeles, Chicago and New York). My eBay seller page is located at http://search.eBay.com/_W0QQsassZcustomknithatsQQhtZ-1 and my eBay world page is located at http://myworld.eBay.com/customknithats/.

Currently I am working with some computer programmers from my school to develop a technology that would enable a website to cancel an eBay auction as soon as the item is purchased from an online store, allowing an item to be sold both on eBay and on a separate online store at the same time without the possibility of two people ordering it. Once this occurs and the capital is obtained, our website will provide the least expensive tickets readily available anywhere within a month of when a show will take place anywhere on the Internet.

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