I laughed like a drain when a friend sent me the link to this sale of 70′s/80′s records on eBay.

Talk about underselling your product! This guy positively spits the words out.

Given how rude he is about the collection, its former owner and anyone who actually wants to buy it you might think he wouldn’t make any money out of it at all. As it is, though, right now (28th May) he’s up to £82 offered, 24 bids and over 11,000 views of the page. And that’s with more than five days to go.

This page has already gone viral (the fact I’m writing about it now shows that) so I expect the bids to go even higher.

It proves a few things about selling:

• Telling a story and getting people interested in you as well as your product (i.e. the human story behind something) really works.
• Make people laugh and (in the UK at least) they will love you and what you’re selling
• Reverse psychology can work – although it’s a dangerous road to go down unless you’re good at it
• In the online world, if you can come up with something that is really funny/interesting/astounding or generally amazing then your readers will advertise for you. Who knows where this viral could go.
• It’s a good idea to cross-sell where possible. See the end of his description and you will find a link to his website. He’ll be getting thousands of hits on that and who knows, he might get work out of it too. Clever!

I don’t think this seller wrote this in order to create all this attention. He might have done but I suspect he simply used it as a outlet for his anger and his creativity. This brings me to a final point that I have picked up from reading it (and re-reading it just for laughs), which is that honesty coupled with creativity is a powerful tool in life generally, and certainly in business. It can bring surprising results.