Ebay alternatives? Other auction sites that you would recommend...

[aaamusements]

With Ebay becoming progressively more expensive, restrictive, and indifferent to it's users, I know a lot of people on other forums have been investigating alternatives, or even setting up sites themselves.

Although it's clear that nothing can directly rival Ebay in the near future, some have had success with sites like Ebid, and niche, special interest auction sites run by and for enthusiasts.

I must admit that I do have a vested interest in all of this, having recently set up a UK auction site for fruit machines and coin operated slot and general amusement arcade equipment, but it's early days at the moment and is obviously going to take a while to catch on. This despite the fact that Ebay have completely taken against fruit machines on their site, regularly pulling listings and invoking confusing and inconsistent policies relating to the content of listings!

So the question is, has anyone tried an alternative, either on or off line, and had any appreciable success? Or has also set one up themselves?

 

[That Guy]

You can sell on Amazon.co.uk but not do auctions, not sure if this is any good to you?

 

[aaamusements]

Not really what I meant no, although it is an alternative to Ebay and one that I have used in the past, it's not an auction site. But thank you anyway

 

[Elementary Mail]

Havant tried it myself but "ebid" claims to offer an alternative to eBay. Also "dhgate" is worth checking out, no auction but good discounts to be had on bulk orders.
Hope this was useful

 

[buygifts]

if you want to shift a serious number of items there is no real alternative to ebay at the moment.
Ebid and Cqout are the main rivals. They both get a reasonable amount of traffic via the search engines but suffer from a lack of public awareness. The upside is you can list as much as you want for no additional fees. Final valuation fees are about a fifth of ebay's.
I've sold items on both but they have taken a good while to sell.
They both need more sellers.
Cqout can set up a cron job to automatically take a csv feed from your website to create and close listings for a one off fee or you can bulk upload via csv.
Ebid have their own version of turbolister and are also able to accept bulk csv uploads.
If only both of these sites could spend some real money on advertising then they might be serious competitors.

 

[midiman]

Ebay sucks I have had so many problems with them. They treat sellers like dirt.

Then they combine with PayPal to take 15% of the value of every sale you make.

I hope Anonymous take them down. That will teach them to become greedy in a time where people are desperate to sell things.

Amazon are no better, I think they take 17% of your total transaction when you sell on their site.

 

[mattlongfitness]

Set up your own site, use a shopping cart... easy

 

[BusyGoo]

Set up your own site, use a shopping cart... easy

Exactly, however its murder trying to get content and members when one or the other is missing, i spent years using ebay and still do..but with ebay and paypal taking everything and everybody now getting use to the idea that you have to bid in the last 10 seconds.. this makes it hard for sellers to gamble on letting the auction run or end it before the 12 hrs remaining is up. That is why i opened my site to have ago and try and encorporate a bit of auction and classifieds together by offering a postage option and make offer on the classifieds.. i suppose its just time and patience but trying to get people to realize that its free and only requires your time to get free advertising just doesn't happen. The truth of it is that my members must be prepared to list the items and wait till the site picks up, they dont expire untill they remove them but whos gonna take time to just list and wait... the sad fact is that if you want to sell now...its Ebay.

 

[Chris34]

If your setting up a site to rival Ebay then you need to be cheaper at every level. People are always looking to get something cheaper so you should look at losing money in the early days in order to win market share.

Free to list isn't good enough, sellers just price match with Ebay. The goods have to be cheaper than Ebay to tempt people to switch. If you are setting up an auction site to compete with Ebay then you would be best selling items yourself at a loss, word would then spread at how cheap everything was and people would then visit the site.



Chris.

 

[DCP]

If I was trying to compete with ebay, I would'nt try to compete with them on every category.
Instead, I would focus on one category e.g. tools or clothes or car parts
get some big sellers, good products, improve the product search, and try and compete with ebay by ranking higher on the search engines. for example, as a car parts man, i think ebay's product search/navigation for finding car parts is pants. after all these years of increasing vehicle parts sales, they've still not managed to even implement a vehicle engine size filter.

the main selling point would have to be, "our auctions are appearing page 1, we have massive traffic and people can search products better than they can on ebay"

setup the feeds for the big sellers and make it dead easy to do so. e.g. i don't have time to waste experimenting with setting up feeds to lesser know sites, but if someone wants to do all the work for me, then by all means go for it. promote my products and i'm fine to pay a commission if they sell. many industries have buying groups. get these on board and you've got your sellers. easier to do if you're focussing on one industry sector.

 

[Thinehost]

I must admit that I do have a vested interest in all of this, having recently set up a UK auction site for fruit machines and coin operated slot and general amusement arcade equipment, but it's early days at the moment and is obviously going to take a while to catch on. This despite the fact that Ebay have completely taken against fruit machines on their site, regularly pulling listings and invoking confusing and inconsistent policies relating to the content of listings!

I had a quick look at your site and have a couple of comments.

• there is a link to a forum in your top navigation bar which gives a 404 error (Not found) You should probably remove the link.
• I have my screen resolution set to 1024 wide and am having to scroll which is really annoying. It means that I couldn't see the percentage charged on auctions because that figure is at the far right of the page.
• Your home page title just says "Fruit-Machine-Sales" - you could add "New and Used Fruit Machines for sale".
• Not knowing the auction software, is there a way you could add some text to the category pages - describing the types of machine or the brands/manufacturers which are most likely to come up?
• Google knows you exist - a quick search for fruit machine sales show you are probably on page two. Adding content to the site should help with your rankings.

I don't know what else you have done to market your site (offline advertising, article writing, etc) - but starting a new site like this is likely to require a huge effort to get it going properly.


Best wishes
M

 

[buygifts]

Getting connection time out errors on your site. Has the site been taken down?

 

[elainedon]

Set up your own site, use a shopping cart... easy

That part is easy, but traffic and conversion are the harder parts, which is why I still use ebay. Is there any ebay-like site that gets as much traffic as ebay? If so, please let me know!

 

[liongroup]

In terms of marketplaces that are growing i.e attracting lots of new customers both buy side and sell side, Gumtree is probably the best place for UK merchants. (Excluding Amazon/eBay)

 

[silvermusic]

In terms of marketplaces that are growing i.e attracting lots of new customers both buy side and sell side, Gumtree is probably the best place for UK merchants. (Excluding Amazon/eBay)

I take it you're aware of who owns Gumtree.

Auctions for anything other than collectables is a dying format, even eBay says so. I hate to think how many eBay competitors large and small I've seen come and go over the last dozen years, love it or hate it, there's no denying that done well eBay is a great place to make money still.

 

[Websitehandyman]

My football auction site is growing, although still to go live I'm not complaining at over 300 members so far.

 

[BusyGoo]

the sad fact is that if you want to sell now...its Ebay

For now at least anyway, the sooner sites can at least take a little bit out of ebay it may when they all add up to lots of sites taking business from ebay force them to reduce the costs for sellers. Hopefully

 

[liongroup]

I take it you're aware of who owns Gumtree.

Yes, Gumtree.

 

[BusyGoo]

Until a few weeks ago no, but yes EGumTree...

 

[TCCuk]

I used to sell on eBay, they are son expensive now, it's impossible to compete with the powersellers, and make a profit especially with eBay and Paypal taking the percentage they do.

I tried Ebid, I think I paid £6.99 a month for the seller + package, it is free to list your items, you can list until sold, and they only take a small percentage when you sell and item, I was one of the only people listed in the catergory, I was top of the list when you typed in the product.

This all sounds brilliant but because it isn't very popular, I only had about 9 people looking at my item in the 1 and a half months it was listed, and sold nothing.

Im sure it will take off with it being cheaper than eBay however its hard to compete with the giants.

 

[Morraine]

I used to sell on eBay, they are son expensive now, it's impossible to compete with the powersellers, and make a profit especially with eBay and Paypal taking the percentage they do.

I tried Ebid, I think I paid £6.99 a month for the seller + package, it is free to list your items, you can list until sold, and they only take a small percentage when you sell and item, I was one of the only people listed in the catergory, I was top of the list when you typed in the product.

This all sounds brilliant but because it isn't very popular, I only had about 9 people looking at my item in the 1 and a half months it was listed, and sold nothing.

Im sure it will take off with it being cheaper than eBay however its hard to compete with the giants.

ebid was founded in 1998 and has burned millions and made no impact what so ever in eBay's business. the thing with this type of business is that because of the "network effect" only one general auction site per country will be very successful. eBay are not successful in some other countries even with there billions to spend on advertising were another player has beat them to number one first.

 

[aaamusements]

ebid was founded in 1998 and has burned millions and made no impact what so ever in eBay's business. the thing with this type of business is that because of the "network effect" only one general auction site per country will be very successful. eBay are not successful in some other countries even with there billions to spend on advertising were another player has beat them to number one first.

Yep in general I agree. But I still believe that niche and special interest sites will always be able to make an impact, done well.

 

[martin10]

I do most of my selling on ebay. There is no contest for the amount of traffic it can generate. I also sell on other sites and have my own website but ebay is by far the best for traffic.
You have to be smart on ebay with the listings. I list a lot with the multiple variation listings and subscribe to the cheapest shop, that way I keep the costs down.
Amazon is far too expensive with final fees and the pre set postage charge. Ebid is a waste of time and my own website is slow because people just come back to my shop on ebay.
I also sell on a specilaists site but nothing achieves the same results as ebay. They are a pain with the fees and the new rules they bring in to stuff the sellers but you have to work around that because you get the traffic.
Lets face it when anybody wants to buy something on line the first place they go to is either Ebay or Amazon .

 

[Alan]

@aaamusements isn't using a website name in your signature bending the forum rules a bit? About time you paid a subscription and got a proper signature?

I see you have a pretty standard PHP-Probid Auction site. For those that fancy setting up an auction site this is a great bit of software, for about £100 you get everything, from payment gateways, to PM messages, to standard auctions, buy-it-now, and even shops, with every conceivable charge band, https for members areas, bulk uploaders etc.

I though I'd augment my online parts 'cart' by creating an auction site, I selected PhP-Probid as the tool, I listed a 1,000 odd items of my own, and I set it up as FREE to list - No Charge to Sell, yet I still only attracted a handful of extra listings and made just one sale myself. The site is turned off at the moment, but if any-one wants an instant auction site, I can sort that out for you pretty quickly.

I also tried Amazon, which was OK for certain type of products, then 4 months ago I set up an e-bay shop, which now turns over twice what my online shop does.

Then e-bay gets the traffic, and they should do, they reputedly spend £4million per month on AdWords, and just 5 minutes ago they were advertising on mainstream prime time TV (not cheap).

So there will always be room for niche sites - but if you want to take out e-bay you'd probably need to earmark £100-£200million marketing budget for teh year or two that it will take to over turn them. (not to mention spending a bit more than £100 on the software)


p.s. just notice 3 oclock football is also a php-probid. Fantastic

 

[Runner900]

Set up your own site, use a shopping cart... easy

Agree with this. Nowdays, due to the number of options, it is so easy to set up your own store. If you're not happy with ebay, make your own store and market it.

I see you've set up your own alternative to ebay - good luck with it.

 

[aaamusements]

@aaamusements isn't using a website name in your signature bending the forum rules a bit? About time you paid a subscription and got a proper signature?

Whilst I can see your point as such, it's not a hyperlink and hence completely within the rules as I understand them. If a moderator informs me otherwise I will happily remove it, but I don't personally think it's an issue as I am not gaining any advantage from it.
It's simply there so that others on this forum can see what I am doing at the moment (particularly in a relevant thread like this).
Due to the significant time and money that I am currently putting into loss-making ventures such as this and others, I just don't have the money spare to upgrade my membership on the many sites that I contribute to. I really have to use resources carefully.
If I paid for every subscription and upgrade on every single site that I use, I wouldn't be in business, I would be in jail...

Hopefully at some point in the future, if I am able to draw a wage from some of my sites instead of throwing money at them, I will be able to upgrade here. That will be a good day indeed.

 

[Moderator]

the signature is within the forum rules

 

[dave4129]

Hi guys i have just joined the business forum and the first thread i have viewed is this one ......

This is great for us... we are about to unveil our new website which is an alternative to eBay !!!!!!



We hope to be up and running with our bespoke web site next month please look out for this ......

 

[IzzoNet]

With Ebay becoming progressively more expensive, restrictive, and indifferent to it's users, I know a lot of people on other forums have been investigating alternatives, or even setting up sites themselves.

Although it's clear that nothing can directly rival Ebay in the near future, some have had success with sites like Ebid, and niche, special interest auction sites run by and for enthusiasts.

I must admit that I do have a vested interest in all of this, having recently set up a UK auction site for fruit machines and coin operated slot and general amusement arcade equipment, but it's early days at the moment and is obviously going to take a while to catch on. This despite the fact that Ebay have completely taken against fruit machines on their site, regularly pulling listings and invoking confusing and inconsistent policies relating to the content of listings!

So the question is, has anyone tried an alternative, either on or off line, and had any appreciable success? Or has also set one up themselves?

Hello,

Although ebay expensive and restrictive, don't forget that it's a hugh auctions site and the traffic of the potentional customers there is very high. which means, that if you want to sell products in an auction platform, you should consider ebay seriously.

Good luck!

 

[fetamy]

Ebid is very much handy. I used it for my white ford. It was 1997 FORD FESTIVA WD GLI and I sold it for $2,980*.

 

[dave4129]

We have now set up our own auction / market place web site called imsellingat.com . We are getting more items on and we are exspecting to get even bustier on the run up to Xmas . Please take a look it's free to sell items at present .

Cheers Dave

 

[alexbroom00]

There are loads of ebay alternatives around it just a matter of picking the right one

Ebay has most of the traffic, but I think this is going to change soon as ebay seem to be getting to greedy.

try freedombid.com they offer a zero listing fee and you only pay 1% if your item sells.

 

[ITsoldUK]

A friend/client of ours uses DelCampe and has seen sales increase significantly over the last 6 months.

All depends on your market I would imagine as to which route you then choose.

 

[nancyfromafrica]

amazon and alibaba.com are some of the other options.

 

[alwaysinamess]

Hello,

Although ebay expensive and restrictive, don't forget that it's a hugh auctions site and the traffic of the potentional customers there is very high. which means, that if you want to sell products in an auction platform, you should consider ebay seriously.

Good luck!

Ebay are dropping auctions soon, a lot is changing, We just lost our account manager as we were basically told that what we do is still a part of ebay but it is not what they want to concentrate on, Ive been on ebay from day one and had to adapt and change, start new companies and end old ones to stick it out.

He said to me ebay is where people go to buy there junk and if they want something nice they goto Amazon, I kind of disagreed with that but that is the feedback they have got back, and that is what they are going to change.

Ebay grows and kills your business in a instant, you need to constantly adapt and right now I would say if you want to do that then move away from the auction type listings.

 

[David P]

Ebay are dropping auctions soon, a lot is changing, We just lost our account manager as we were basically told that what we do is still a part of ebay but it is not what they want to concentrate on, Ive been on ebay from day one and had to adapt and change, start new companies and end old ones to stick it out.

He said to me ebay is where people go to buy there junk and if they want something nice they goto Amazon, I kind of disagreed with that but that is the feedback they have got back, and that is what they are going to change.

Ebay grows and kills your business in a instant, you need to constantly adapt and right now I would say if you want to do that then move away from the auction type listings.

Although there is a lot less emphasis placed on auctions I cannot believe that ebay will get rid of them. That is the one thing that really sets them apart from other major ecommerce retail sites such as amazon.

Your certainly right about the need to constantly adapt if selling on ebay. This has been particularly prominent in the past few years but i think the rate and impact of changes on eBay will lessen as they are getting closer to the business that they have wanted to be for the past few years. Could be completely wrong of course, fingers crossed.

 

[Alan]

In a different business than I am in now, I have tried the trio of my own e-commerce site, Amazon & e-bay.

My specific experience is that its was not worth running my own e-commerce site, although the fees (Amazon/e-bay) seem high at first (15% and 10%ish plus paypal fees) they are quite reasonable given the amount of traffic / sales you get compared to the cost./effort of promoting your own site.

With Amazon, it was more successful with generic quality goods, especially ones that had customer reviews (a feature that e-bay does not really have), however with really niche technical items e-bay was better, I think that the seller 'feedback' scores in e-bay help a lot in the buying decision for specialist items, it is a case of 'I know what I want, do I trust the seller to deliver'- BUT in buy-it-now form only - the auction form was a total waste of time.

At a non-business level, e-bay has been useful in Auction format to get a few quid for junk that I no longer need, however the effort / versus return is so little I often list items on 'freecycle'.

 

[Sleepkings]

The best alternative to eBay is to have your own website. eBay and amazon are a good starting point however they are not seller friendly and they will always reaming the most expensive selling platforms.
With your own website you can offer your customers the 12-15% in the fees you save.
Sellers need to ensure the products they sell are good value for money and you will build up a genuine customer base. Online sale same on the up year on year.
Sleepkings.co.uk

 

[Websitehandyman]

Fact is ebay is only for junk, sure if you know junk better then others you might get a bargain.

Even large companies now are using it to sell out dated and rubbish stock to the gullible buyer simply because the expectations of those buyers are lower and the come back is lower because most are too idle to return items in the post.

 

[David P]

Fact is ebay is only for junk, sure if you know junk better then others you might get a bargain.

Even large companies now are using it to sell out dated and rubbish stock to the gullible buyer simply because the expectations of those buyers are lower and the come back is lower because most are too idle to return items in the post.

I am sorry but I have to disagree with this. For us returns from ebay are higher than from Amazon. Buyers are also more demanding in terms of customer support etc. I suspect this is because of the trust issue, the majority of people shopping on amazon automatically feel confident in their purchase simply because it is on amazon whereas on eBay a large amount of buyers are incredibly paranoid about being ripped off in some way. This is a hangover from the old eBay when it was mostly about auctions and second hand products, that was the days of proper junk