"My house is filled with this crap
Shows up in bubble wrap
'Most every day
What I bought on eBay."
eBay
, the web's
Bazaar of the Bizarre. Although it acts primarily as an
auction-based website, some sellers use "Buy It Now!" buttons allowing you to instantly purchase the item at "bargain" prices.
It can be a useful way of averting
No Export for You, to
Keep Circulating the Tapes and - as with everything else on the web - helping indulge your
Fetish Fuel. You cannot, however, sell people or weapons. We've tried.
eBay has now become a trope in itself, as the place where heroes can find their
Plot Coupons.
Tropes on eBay:
eBay in media:
- The Big Bang Theory: Sheldon sells a World of Warcraft item on eBay. This is, however, a case of Did Not Do the Research, as Blizzard would have banned Sheldon and the buyer from Warcraft for doing this.
- The Dresden Files: In a case of Did Not Do the Research, one villain tries to sell Harry on eBay.
- Transformers: Sam intends to sell his great-grandfather's glasses on eBay (thanks to a Product Placement deal for the film).
- "Weird Al" Yankovic's song "eBay"
- In the British panel game show Would I Lie to You?, panelists sometimes have a "Possession" which they must claim as their own (and convincingly argue that it really is theirs when it is not, or vice versa). A common justification is that this was a late-night drunken eBay purchase.
- XKCD with this strip, which is later referenced in the mouseover text of this one.
- Jay Leno used to do a segment on his show called "Stuff we found on eBay". He would present a collection of some of the most blood-stoppingly inane stuff on eBay at that time, and ask the audience if it got sold or not.
- Joe Hill's novel Heart-Shaped Box is a curious example. The main character buys a ghost from what the book describes as "an online auction site, not eBay, but one of the wannabes".
- In Finding Nemo the aquarium fish list where they came from. For the Starfish, that's Ebay. Except that live animals aren't allowed to be sold on Ebay, making this a case of Did Not Do the Research
- In Toy Story 3, Hamm suggests to the group that they look up what they're going for on Ebay, because, after all, Andy doesn't want them anymore.
- Yellow Eyes has something of a running gag about how it's amazing what you can find on eBay, including an alien medical device used to build a physical body for an AI and a mate for a formerly hostile Posleen advising the humans after the war.
- An early Sequential Art storyline had Pip getting carried away in an auction for a rare comic book issue, getting a winning bid of several thousand dollars that he couldn't afford to pay. In a case of Did Not Do the Research, to pay for it he auctioned off Scarlet, a squirrel living with them, on eBay.
- The Amazing World of Gumball features JUNK
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