In 1995, San Franciscan Pamela Wesley was batting a thousand on being considered a total geek. Not only was she an avid collector of Pez candy dispensers, but she was also dating a French immigrant named Pierre who had a degree in computer science.

Wesley's obsession with trading Pez dispensers -- and her appetite for networking with other Pez collectors -- might have driven other beaus away, but it didn't faze Pierre, who was a gold medalist in the Nerd Olympics himself.

Outside of his tenures developing software for Apple Computer and engineering at a mobile-communications company called General Magic, Pierre Omidyar (pronounced oh-MID-ee-ar) harbored a bit of an entrepreneurial streak. He had his own Web page, which in 1995, mind you, was irrefutable evidence of a card-carrying resident of Squaresville, USA. For $30 a month he rented space for his Web page from his local Internet service provider.

One day Omidyar got the idea to mesh his Web-site hobby with his girlfriend's insatiable Pez-dispenser habit. He set up an interface on his page that enabled Wesley to attract, meet, auction and trade with other Pez enthusiasts via the Internet. The darling Miss Wesley was thrilled on Sept. 1, 1995, when their online auction service was launched.

The site was called eBay's Auction Web, a name derived from the nickname "the Electronic Bay," a reference to the area around Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay. The couple's site attracted Internet users around the world, most buying and selling goods in no way related to Pez. Within five months Omidyar had quit his day job and eBay was a profitable enterprise.

Less than two years after eBay's launch, the high rollers at Benchmark Capital invested $5 million for a 22 percent stake in the company. During 1997, sales grew by 1,432 percent. And when eBay hit NASDAQ in September 1998, the company's initial public offering raised $63 million on its first day of trading. The value of all the goods traded through eBay during the year 2000 was more than $5 billion, and the number of registered eBay users earlier this year topped 18.9 million. Although Internet statistics change every day, many reports have listed eBay as the most popular shopping site on the Internet.

Switch to the local business scene and Georgetown, Ind., resident Michael Fowler, who helps direct Preferred Medical Supply, a company that acquires and rents out medical equipment and has offices in Elizabethtown and on Steedley Drive in South Louisville. A few years ago Preferred Medical was in a bit of a slump. To breathe a little life back into their company, Fowler and his cohorts decided to get deeper into what he calls the "salvage business."

Having discovered that a hoard of videocassette movies belonging to Louisville's defunct Roadrunner Video stores were available for purchase, Preferred bought them all, adding them to its inventory of comforters and medical equipment. Then Fowler learned that some of their customers were making huge profits buying their videos and reselling them on eBay. Well, before you could say, "Be Kind -- Rewind," the gang at Preferred decided to get into the racket themselves. They started selling videos and their other merchandise on eBay.

Fowler, 40, says they couldn't believe the response: "It's like an international yard sale. We have sold some very rare videos for as much as $150 each, and we would never have been able to do this locally. People can also find rare items that normally they wouldn't be able to find in the areas where they live. We have shipped items to England, Singapore, Israel, Japan, South Africa." Two years after they first started using online auctions, Fowler says, the method has become "a nice addition to our regular business. We usually gross $10,000 to $12,000 per month (on eBay)."

Hoosier Steve Parker, 39, who owns a Louisville battery-supply business, has spent years fueling his compulsion to buy, sell and collect vintage fountain pens. "Surely," you're thinking, "the vintage fountain pen-collecting community must just be Steve and two other guys who get together on the first Saturday of the month." Think again.

Fountain pen collectors even have their own eBay-style auction site, believe it or not. Penbid.com, based in Pennsylvania, boasts that it is "the largest Internet auction dedicated exclusively to writing instruments." At any given moment, Penbid visitors can browse, search and bid on hundreds of pens and pen-related items (books, catalogs, nibs, et cetera) up for auction in dozens of categories. Parker (whose last name is only a little ironic) explains that online selling is "a natural extension of the pen-collecting community, building on the dozen or so pen shows and auctions held annually around the country."

"Online auctions," he says, "cost a fraction of retail or classifieds, provide millions of potential buyers, and my items can be found by the most likely buyers in seconds."

Most of Parker's buyers are other pen collectors, and judging by the amount of money that's exchanged, the enthusiasm among them is fairly intense. "Lower-end pens," which he says are the ones under $200, "usually go to new collectors, while higher-end pieces usually go to people I know from pen shows and previous dealings," and can get into the thousands of dollars for a single pen. While Parker has used specialized auction sites such as Penbid, "the real buyers, quality and quantity," he says, "are at eBay." He has spent about 10 to 15 hours a week immersed in eBay auctions since he first logged on in 1998. The majority of his sales inventory comes from the same sources it did prior to the advent of the Internet: Louisville-area antiques dealers and estate auctions.

Dealing vintage pens can be quite lucrative for educated investors. "For me," Parker explains, "it's really more about building my own collection than a business. The pens I sell are to generate cash to buy. I've sold about $10,000 in pens, and bought about $5,000." It's almost as if these gents don't know you can get a package of 10 Bics at Target for 99 cents.

Pam Forsee Hogue, the art director at a local advertising agency, and her husband, Jeff, began renting a space in the Swan Street Antique Mall in the early 1990s. Their space -- dubbed Decorama -- features "vintage-modern" dinnerware, Bake-lite jewelry, Lucite purses and accessories, and fantastic pieces of furniture that seem like what Patty and Cathy Lane might have imagined a home of the future would look like. Decorama's specialty is Russel Wright and other '50s and '60s dinnerware designs.

Hogue recalls that she offered their merchandise to Internet customers beginning in 1996: "I started selling by joining an Internet discussion group specific to my area of dealing and collecting, and this exposed me to a lot of buyers. My Internet business actually began with just an e-mail box." The response was so encouraging that she launched her own Web site, DecoramaShop.com, in late 1998.

Like Steve Parker, most of Hogue's inventory comes from estate sales, other antique malls and dealer shows. Some pieces are purchased at conventional auctions -- "analog auctions," if you will. She now spends only about an hour online each day, primarily answering e-mail requests, al-though listing new items takes much longer. "If I want to list half a dozen items," she says, "it will take a whole evening to do it all." She reports that her online sales volume is "equivalent to another professional-level salary" coming into their household. Not a bad return for those few extra hours a week.

Like Michael Fowler, Hogue uses the Internet and sites like eBay primarily as utilities to bolster her existing retail business. While she still uses eBay to buy and sell items, her own Web site has grown much more profitable for her. "What's lucrative about auctions," she says, "is that you know you will sell those items this week, whereas in a conventional retail space, it sits there until the right customer walks in. So if you need cash flow, that's a great alternative. It also exposes and connects you to buyers that can be repeat buyers in the future without the auction process."

Fowler echoes that sentiment from his customers. "Since we also sell medical equipment, sometimes a buyer on eBay will want to come see what type of inventory we have and purchase direct," he says. "I've seen several sellers on eBay that -- after they've acquired a large following -- will stop selling in auctions and sell direct, since they now have a customer base."

While Fowler, Hogue and Parker all deal in respectable amounts of money on the Internet and in online auctions, the consensus seems to be that it hasn't been a classic get-rich-quick story for any of them. Hogue thinks that myth is one of the big-gest misconceptions about selling on the Internet -- that it is "an effortless gold mine." Hardly the case. Online selling and auctions actually add more work on top of their regular businesses. But expanding their sales potential into this new market has undoubtedly proven to be an opportunity lucrative enough that the extra hours don't seem to bother any of them.