Coughing up: Alison Healy on the strange and surprising world of online marketplaces

Aren’t children full of surprises? A few years ago, one of mine came in from school and casually told me he had been banned from DoneDeal, the classified adverts website.
As he released this information, I was frantically trying to stop the saucepan of pasta from boiling over and his two brothers were fighting over who sat on a particular chair. With all the chaos going on, my brain filed the DoneDeal ban as something to return to. And of course I promptly forgot about it.
The following day, he came in from school and announced the principal might be giving me a phone call about DoneDeal. No parent likes to hear the words principal and phone call in the same sentence. After some probing, it emerged he thought it would be a jolly jape if he and his friend posted an ad on DoneDeal.
The school iPads were still a novelty for the first-year students and they were determined to make good use of them. But what could they advertise? This website sells everything from a Suffolk ram to a designer wedding dress but the boys had neither item at their disposal. So, my son took a photograph of his friend and they posted it, offering the child for sale. They helpfully added that he was good at picking stones and cutting sticks.
The two boys went back to studying the rise of the Roman Empire and thought no more about it. Meanwhile, alarm bells must have instantly rung at DoneDeal headquarters because the ad was flagged within minutes. The idea of advertising a child in a school uniform for sale was problematic on so many fronts. The IP address led to the school and the principal was alerted.
If it was problematic for the small ads website, it was even more problematic for the harried principal. But once he established that the boys were co-conspirators and there was no bullying involved, it didn’t seem quite as bad. And so I received that awkward phone call and found myself apologising for the fact that my son tried to sell his classmate. He got off lightly with two days of detention and was more troubled about the duration of the DoneDeal ban.
The boys wouldn’t be the only ones to try to sell something unusual online. In 2006 an Australian tried to sell New Zealand on eBay, starting the bidding at one Australian cent. By the time eBay got around to removing it, it had attracted 22 bids and a price of $3,000.
Iceland did notably better when someone tried to auction it during the financial crisis in 2008. Their trick was to start with a higher bid – they opened at 99p and it rose to £10 million. The ad pointed out that singer Björk was not included in the sale so this may have discouraged some Icelandophiles from bidding more. In the buyer’s questions, one wag wondered if their payment would be frozen while another asked if it included volcano and earthquake insurance.
These online marketplaces can offer succour to those who believe that revenge is a dish best served piping hot. One of those people was Hayley Shaw, the wife of a British television presenter and DJ Tim Shaw. During his radio show he told his guest, model Jodie Marsh, that he would leave his wife and children for her. In response, his wife immediately put his beloved Lotus Esprit sports car on eBay. And the price? 50p. It sold within five minutes and was gone by the time he returned from work. According to one report, he bought it back afterwards.
But when it comes to unusual items for sale online, the cough drop on eBay is hard beaten. Not just any cough drop, mind. This one had allegedly been sucked by then California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger before he threw it in a bin in Sacramento. The seller was asking buyers to cough up a tidy $500 to “own a piece of DNA from the man himself”.
According to the LA Times, the listing included two photos of a yellowing, half-sucked cough drop, and a sales pitch that described the sweet as a “must have”. Unfortunately for the seller, it turned into a “must not have” because it had been advertised as Schwarzenegger’s DNA. This meant it fell into the body parts category, therefore violating the auction company’s rules, so the ad was removed. EBay said it could be sold as a collectible but it was a case of hasta la vista baby for his lozenge. Unlike the actor, the cough drop did not come back.