eGads!

No. 3 is in ... the town that got hooked on eBay. The idea was to explore how this little pocket of Lumberton, N.J. could be the part of America with the highest rate of wheeling and dealing on the online auction service. It has to do with Barbies and smelly Ben Franklins, but read for yourselves:

You almost expect a sign on the Mount Holly bypass that would read:

"Entering Lumberton, feedback rating 99.8 percent positive."

The gas stations would take PayPal. At the Lumberton Post Deli you'd bid on bologna.

Which would be appropriate, seeing that you're in the most mad-for-eBay corner of America.

When the online auction house commissioned a survey in the fall to find its most active customers, no other places were busier, no folks more wired, no hearts more yearning, per capita, than in the 08048 zip code in this fast-growing township in Burlington County.

The 46,000 items up for auction in Lumberton during the first three weeks in November would be a striking number anywhere, not just in a zip code where the last census counted only 663 people. That's about 70 items per person. If you take babies out of the survey, it's higher than that.

How could this be? A place that art dealer Peter DeStefano used to call Deer Tick, N.J., beating big-time burgs like Nashville and Las Vegas?

Knock on a few doors in Lumberton, and you'll hear the same reaction: "It's got to be a hoax," township clerk Maureen Horton Gross said.

But no. The explanation has something to do with free time, disposable income, yards of yard sales, and a population explosion, which skews the ranking, since it's based on current eBay activity and six-year-old census figures.

Let's start with Lee Yeash.

Four kids, no storage

"I can almost bet you I'm part of the reason," says the 45-year-old preschool aide with four children, no storage space, and a degree in marketing.

She has a simple rule, perfected during husband John's Air Force career:

"If you have to clean it, dust it or move it, it's gone."

A tour of her townhouse in the Bobby's Run development might as well be an ad for eBay:

Forty-two pieces of vintage Barbie clothing, a couple of American Girl minis, all the Nancy Drew mysteries, and some of the Left Behind series. Plus, Topps and Fleer baseball cards from 1986 to 1990. Candelabras that look like palm trees, CDs, DVDs, puppet theaters - in fact, nearly all of Christmas 2006.

Then, in the kitchen, dishes, champagne flutes, wine glasses, a coffee maker, teapots, water filters.

And that's just the stuff she bought. She has sold treasures in equal amounts - her son's Scooby-Do costume, her grandmother's vintage underwear.

Her husband testifies with rolled eyes to her cold efficiency. "I have to go to eBay to buy back all the stuff of mine that she's gotten rid of."

A second career online

On eBay, Nate Wood, a 32-year-old financial adviser, has found a second career. Each week he sells things his mother-in-law drags back from yard sales, flea markets and store closings.

The great flood of 2004 put Wood in the game. He wound up spending $270 on a custom-made door that didn't fit. When the hardware store refused to take it back, he put it up for auction. He finally unloaded the thing for $200 plus $100 shipping. But that was the last time he lost money.

"You know what I think it is?" he says. "You work at a job and you start thinking, 'There's got to be a better way to hit the American dream.' "

For Peter DeStefano, in his gallery, that dream smells like aftershave - little George Washington and Ben Franklin figurines that reveal spray pumps when their heads come off. He has quite the collection, courtesy of eBay, including a faux-porcelain hot-water spigot filled with Sweet Honesty - a fragrance he describes as "just horrible."

For some reason, this makes him think of the father of his best friend from his 20s, a German emigre named Egon von Haferburg.

"He looked like he fell out of a Ghostbusters movie. He'd say, 'You guys know nothing. When you are older, you'll be able to do banking on the telephone. You'll be able to get on a computer and talk to people around the world.' We thought he was nuts.

"Now I'm 49, and I can sell a picture to someone in India. It's like going to a marketplace for the world."