Top 5 Unusual Sale Items from eBay

Top 5 Unusual Sale Items from eBay

Over the years eBay has been home to billions of auctions, ranging from the simple sale of an iPod to the complicated postage nightmares of sofas, pool tables and beds.

Every now and again, however, there are items listed on eBay that go against conventional thought and begin to enter the realms of the absurd. The aforementioned items range from a single cornflake to a U.S. Air Force jet fighter.

Many of these weird items are sold as part of a charity campaign, raising money for good causes, and some are listed by entrepreneurial masterminds looking to make a quick buck from the buzz these items generate.

Here we have compiled our Top 5 Unusual Items from eBay for your enjoyment, so if you’re not quite sure what you want to spend your Scrooge McDuck style mountains of money on, then maybe this will help you!

1)    Brussels Sprout – In December 2005, a brussels sprout cooked on Christmas Day was listed by Andrew Henderson of Darlington. It sold for £99.50 on 4 January 2006. The sprout had been frozen and was sent by first class post in insulated packaging to the buyer. The listing was reported in the Daily Star, making the front page (and was followed by a series of "copycat" listings of various vegetables). The proceeds of the sale were donated to Tearfund, a major Christian relief and development agency working in the third world. This sprout was the first cooked brussels sprout to be sold on eBay.

2)    Iceland – In 2008, during the 2008-2009 Icelandic financial crisis, one seller had put Iceland up for sale. The auction started at 99p and reached £10 million within a few weeks. The item description for Iceland read, “Located in the mid-Atlantic ridge in the North Atlantic Ocean, Iceland will provide the winning bidder with — a habitable environment, Icelandic Horses and admittedly a somewhat sketchy financial situation.” Unfortunately for most bidders, Icelandic singer Bjork was not included in the sale. The item was eventually removed by eBay.

3)    Fossils - In August 2008, Dr Richard Harrington, Vice President of the UK Royal Entomological Society, announced that a fossilized aphid he bought for £20 from a seller in Lithuania, was a previously unknown species. It has been named Mindarus harringtoni after Dr Harrington. He had wanted to name it Mindarus ebayi, but this name was disallowed as being too flippant. The 45-million-year-old aphid, preserved in a piece of Baltic amber, is now housed in the Natural History Museum in London.

4)    Breakfast Snacks - An Australian newspaper reported in December 2004 that a single piece of the Kellogg's breakfast cereal Nutri-Grain sold on eBay for AUD$1,035 because it happened to bear a slight resemblance to the character E.T. from the Steven Spielberg movie. Apparently the seller went on to make even more money in relation to the sale for his appearance on a nationally televised current affairs program.

5)    Jet Fighter - In February 2004, a scrapped F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet was listed on eBay by Mike Landa, of Landa and Associates, with a starting bid of $1,000,000. He was the legal owner of the plane after purchasing it from a scrap yard and also offered to have the plane restored for flying condition for a Buy It Now price of $9,000,000. Landa also told potential buyers that maintenance of the plane would cost roughly $40,000 a month for just 2 to 3 hours of flying time. The FBI told Landa that he could only sell the plane to an American citizen residing in the United States, and that the plane must not leave U.S. airspace. The auction ended without a sale.