In August 2002, Lynn Dralle closed the doors to Cheryl Leaf Antiques & Gifts, but that wasn’t the end of her retail business. Today the store’s collection of old furniture, glassware and knickknacks reach thousands more customers from their high-tech home — on eBay.Ms. Dralle’s grandmother, an avid collector, opened the Bellingham, Wash., store 52 years earlier. Ms. Dralle took over the business, where she’d worked on and off since high school, when her grandmother’s health began to decline in 1993. After her grandmother died in 2000 at 88, Ms. Dralle opted to shut down the business because “it just didn’t have the heart and soul it had when my grandmother was there,” she says.
Ms. Dralle didn’t intend to move the store to eBay, where she’d been shopping for years and occasionally sold yard-sale items. Instead, she planned on using the online auction site simply to liquidate inventory. Then most of the merchandise from her grandmother’s store sold for about 10 times as much in online auctions than the price she could get in the store. “It dawned on me that I could keep my grandmother’s business alive simply by moving it to eBay and that I could work from any location,” she says.
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