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Piggybacking Businesses

I’ve never twittered and never sold or bought on eBay. To me the technology and the hassle of the latter are daunting. I came across a franchise chain, iSold It, which solves the fact that I’m eBay-challenged.
Drop off your item at an iSold It store and they handle auctioning it on eBay and sending it to the lucky buyer. They take a cut of the proceeds and send you a check for the rest.
It’s not worth it for a low-value piece of, to quote Weird Al Yankovic, “the kind of stuff you’d throw away,” but worthwhile for a higher-value item. EBay is a business made possible by the internet, and iSold It is a business made possible by eBay. Technological change generates cascades of related businesses and creates jobs and services previously unimagined. How many other examples are there of a new technology that generates a new business than in turn creates yet another type of new business that feeds into it?


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