SOUTH PORTLAND – Margaret Rogosienski has seen the future for getting rid of old stuff: It’s an 1,100-square-foot retail store on a busy stretch of Broadway.

The store, C-it-Sell, is thought to be the first in Maine devoted solely to selling items on eBay for customers. Nationwide and overseas, hundreds of eBay drop-off stores are popping up in strip malls and on street corners from Maine to California, and beyond.

For Americans with jewelry, electronics, clothing, collectibles or any of thousands of other unwanted items, these shops have become 21st-century consignment stores.

Rogosienski, 52, of Portland, brought an old brass railroad lantern to C-it-Sell because she felt she could get a better price on eBay than at a live auction or an antiques store. But she didn’t want to go through the hassle of putting it on eBay herself.

“I don’t want to make a business out of it,” she said. “I’d have to buy a camera, take a digital picture, research the item. They were an agent for me. It’s the same reason I wouldn’t sell my own house, I’d hire a real estate agent.”

The lantern sold for $355, and Rogosienski later used C-it-Sell to auction two vintage men’s vests and an old mink stole.

C-it-Sell was formed by Rich Cady, his brother-in-law, Jeff Ornstein, and their wives. They’ll take an item, research how similar things have sold on eBay, photograph and catalog it, and post it on eBay.

If the item sells, they send you a check. Their fee is 35 percent for the first $300 and 25 percent for the balance, plus eBay’s fees.

Ornstein and Cady say they sell more than two-thirds of the 300 items they list each month. The average sale is about $100.

“People have come in here and said they would sell to a local consignment store, but that limits their exposure to the Portland area,” Cady said. “Whereas on eBay, they’re being exposed to 134 million registered users.”

Even before the store opened last Nov. 26, they had people knocking on the door, ready to bring in their stuff.

The first item they listed was a radio-controlled airplane with a 65-inch wingspan that sold for $200. Two novelty Sumo wrestling suits were bought by a Colorado bar for $910, and a 700-pound industrial food mixer sold for $2,000. They’re now listing a 1988 black Silver Spur Rolls Royce owned by a Cape Elizabeth man. Minimum bid: $19,999.

What’s billed as the first eBay consignment store opened in San Carlos, Calif., in March 2003. Randy Adams, who grew up in Northeast Harbor, got the idea when his wife asked him to clean out the garage and he ended up with a load of goods to sell.

Adams didn’t want to put the items on eBay himself – too much time and effort – and figured there must be a retail outlet somewhere that would do it for him.

When he came up empty, he suspected he was on to something.

He raised money through investors and opened an eBay drop-off store of his own, calling it AuctionDrop. Last June, the company entered into a partnership with UPS so customers can drop off items at the 3,800 UPS Stores nationwide. The UPS Stores then ship the items to AuctionDrop’s processing plant in Fremont, Calif., where they are processed for sale on eBay.

QuikDrop, based in Carson City, Nev., opened its first eBay drop-off store in February 2004 and now has 41 franchises in some 15 states with contracts for another 550 stores. It opened a store in China last month.

iSold It, based in Pasadena, Calif., opened its first store in December 2003 and now has 50 franchises in 21 states with another 400 under contract.

The companies are confident that eBay drop-off centers in time will become ubiquitous.

After all, Americans have a lot of stuff. A recent A.C. Nielsen study found the typical U.S. household has unused items lying around that were purchased for about $2,222 and have current value of about $1,000.

And eBay transactions continue their upward climb. In 2004, $34.2 billion worth of merchandise was sold on eBay, up from $24 billion in 2003 and $15 billion in 2002.

At C-it-Sell, the store is already breaking even and Ornstein and Cady hope to eventually open more stores. Business can only go up, they say, as more people learn that there is an easy way to cash in on their unwanted stuff.