A hearty hat-tip to Mike Starr, who informed me of this website by actually walking me by one of the stores on our way to lunch yesterday: i-SoldIt.com.

Here's how it works: You have an item you want to sell on eBay, but you either don't have the time to do so, or you have no freaking idea how to go about selling something on eBay. So what you do is bring your item to an iSoldIt store (they have 138 stores, located in 36 of the United States, as well as Canada and Australia). They will photograph it for you, write the text that appears on your eBay auction, wait for it to sell, then package it up in a box and send it to the seller. When the seller pays them, they send you a check.

So, to summarize: you drop off your stuff, and they send you a check.

The only downside appears to be the cost: they take 33-40%, plus eBay fees (1.5-5.25%) and payment processing fees (3%), so you could be taking home only about half of what your item sells for. That said, if your item doesn't sell, there is no fee. You can either pick it up within 10 days of the auction's close, or they'll donate it to charity.

What I find most interesting about this business is the fact that eBay has a trust component to it - sellers that successfully sell a lot of items get higher ratings, which makes buyers more likely to buy from them. And since ISoldIt aggregates sellers, they are (or at least, they claim to be) the #1 Seller on eBay, which can actually help your item get sold.

A real bricks & mortar implementation of an eCommerce idea. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before now...