E-bidding for 'Jesus in my Curtains'

Is there anything you can't buy on eBay? Rosita Boland scours the world's largest marketplace in an attempt to find out

Where would you find a soul for sale? A ghost in a jar? A vote in the American election? A Russian submarine? A human kidney? Not to mention clothes, books, antiques, bags, furniture and just about everything that ever came out of a shop or warehouse. All the above have at some point been advertised for sale on eBay, the online auction site.

You could call it the world's biggest shop. This year, eBay celebrates its 10th anniversary, and has 157 million users registered worldwide. Ten years ago, when the internet was just beginning to make its extraordinary impact, American Pierre Omidyar set up the site to help his wife Pam with her hobby: she liked to collect and trade Pez sweet dispensers. The growth since then has been phenomenal - there are now an estimated 750,000 Americans who make their living solely by trading on eBay.

Not quite everything is for sale on eBay, although even the most cursory browse through the website would make it appear so. There is a list of prohibited items, which include: animals and wildlife products; drugs; credit cards; bootleg recordings; stun guns; crossbows; lock-picking devices; stolen property (how do they know?); used underwear; wild mushrooms; out-of-date ready-to-eat meals, unless being bought for collection purposes, rather than consumption; and body parts and remains (so no more human kidneys), although skulls and skeletons that are used for medical purposes are acceptable.

The internet boom and expansion saw the creation of very many shopping sites and various online money-making wheezes. Many of them, such as the sportswear and fashion website, boo.com, which collapsed in 2000, flopped spectacularly. "Boo Hoo" and "Boo-Boo" ran the predictable headlines afterwards, reporting that some $185 million (€150 million) had been lost on the venture, making it one of the biggest e-commerce failures this side of the Atlantic. It had lasted only six months.

By comparison, eBay has expanded ever onward, although the Chinese market - potentially phenomenal - is still elusive. China does not yet have a credit-card culture, and as the vast majority of payment for goods over the internet is done via plastic, China's buying and selling ability remains very restricted. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal, a much-used online payment system that is about as secure as online payments can be. More than 80 per cent of people using eBay use PayPal, which can process all the major credit cards, as opposed to other methods of payment, such as a personal cheque, a wire, money order, postal order or direct debit.

It works like this: to make a bid, you must first register, which is swift and straightforward. You then have a log-in and password. As a seller, you advertise your item, paying a small fee to do so, the cost of which depends on how many facilities you use, such as images, highlighted text and subtitles. As a buyer, you bid for the item you like. You can bid an unseen maximum price, which eBay will automatically start bidding up to if another punter bids against you while you are offline. If successful, a message will be sent to you by e-mail. You then e-mail or message the seller about postage prices, if not already fixed, and make the payment, a cut of which eBay gets, via PayPal. The seller then sends it to you. Both buyer and seller have feedback ratings, posted by other people with whom they have done business, and it's helpful to look at these before buying.

Since June, Ireland has had its own designated eBay site, www.ebay.ie. So what are the advantages of having our own locally-based eBay site? The short answer is probably postage and proximity, and the fact that eBay automatically displays sterling prices in euro when you look at what's available on British eBay via the Irish site. The disadvantage is that our smaller population means there are far fewer things for sale on the Irish site.

To test the whole process, I went browsing around the site, looking for something to buy. Like looking for anything on the internet, unless you refine your search, you could get very lost and very frustrated on eBay and waste lots of time in the process. I wanted to buy . . . hell, what did I want to buy?

When you pull up the eBay site, you see a list of categories beginning with antiques and art, ending with wholesale and job lots, and in between, everything from books, clothes, home and garden, baby, music, sporting goods, stamps and a score or so others. Click on any of these, and up pop many, many more subsections, but you can glance over them reasonably quickly to find the next link. Searching women's clothing, for example, you can quickly refine your search down to the kind of item you're looking for - whether a dress, skirt or jeans, etc, then refine it further by size.

Browsing around eBay is admittedly quite addictive, and I'm generally not one for this kind of website. I've bought airline tickets aplenty online, as well as hotel rooms, and books once on Amazon, but not much else. I am indeed fond of shopping, but I prefer to see what's in front of me before I buy it. However, once I had found my way around the site, I discovered all sorts of things that you don't tend to find in the shops, even antique shops. For instance, "Jesus In My Curtains".

On the Irish eBay site, my attention was caught by a section called "Weird Stuff". Up for auction, starting bid one cent, which had been bid by kateob01, was: "Amazing 'Jesus In My Curtains' Picture. NO FAKE! Looks like Shroud of Turin Image." Who could resist? The seller, colmbie16 from Dublin, had posted a photograph of a curtain, which apparently had this image on it. I could not make it out myself, but one of my colleagues saw it straight away. The seller's message ran:

"I'm offering one 6"x4" colour photo of this wonderful image. It can clearly be seen in a set of curtains in a house I moved into . . . Why would Jesus appear in my curtains? I don't know, but I feel in these turbulent times he may be telling us to "pull together" and is using the curtains as a metaphor . . . Please note: I am NOT selling the actual curtain. I am selling a photograph of the image . . . I am a Christian and do not offer this image for sale as any form of mockery of either my religion or any other. I will donate 50 per cent of any profit made from this auction to a local charity. So please bid!"

I bid €1, raising the stakes by 1,000 per cent. An opportunity to buy "Jesus In My Curtains" - even minus the curtains - doesn't come round too often. There were two days left to go on the auction.

I then got slightly waylaid by the collectables section of eBay, and in particular the "Paper and Ephemera" subsection. On sale were old diaries, love letters, holiday postcards, luggage labels, hotel receipts, newspapers, magazines, notebooks, playing cards, theatre programmes, cartoons, wills, certificates, greeting cards, press cuttings, invoices - all manner of the most fascinating social documents. Well, they're fascinating to me, thus proving the old adage: one man's junk is another man's treasure.

Virtually all sellers use a digital camera to take shots of their goods, and you often have at least three images to scrutinise, as well as a longish description of the goods, written by the seller. Forget the frocks and CDs and bags. For me, eBay was all about "Paper and Ephemera". I considered putting in a bid on two (fully written-up) five-year pre-war diaries, but lost track of them when I continued browsing.

Instead, I put in a bid of €12 on a small old leather-bound notepad. Most of its gold-edged pages were blank, it still had its original pencil, and it fastened with a clasp. The seller informed me that a date of 1941 had been written on it. I love notebooks, the more unusual and old the better.

The day after placing my bids, I was out of the office all day, and thus not near a computer. When I next looked at my e-mail, I discovered I had won the vintage notepad, but had been outbid, at €1.45, for the image of "Jesus in My Curtains". There truly is a buyer for everything.

The charming little notebook duly arrived in the post from an address in Cornwall, wrapped in tissue paper and in a padded envelope. It was exactly as had been described. I opened it. There was a name at the back, Mr G Miles, and a date, 1941. On the flyleaf, in a child's hand, was written: "On Sunday the 5th of August, my first pair of pigeons had eggs." The rest of the notebook is empty. I'm not sure what I'll record in the rest of the notebook, but that's quite something to follow.

eBay is holding an "eBay University Day", about buying and selling online, tomorrow, 9.30am-4.30pm at the Burlington Hotel in Dublin, €35 for the day. See www.ebay.ie for details