Anyone tried ecrater.co.uk? Better than ebay?

money_savings_my_game

I've been selling here and there on ebay for just over a year and been doing ok. However, the fees are just killing me! Insertion fees, final value fees, re-listing fees, paypal fees, postage fees, cost of packaging supplies. Its all too much!

I've been looking for an ebay alternative as ebay basically only favor the buyer and provide almost NO protection for sellers.

I came across ecrater.co.uk and it looks alright. Reviews are saying that its terrible (from the buyer perspective as its less regulated than ebay). I'm wondering if anyone has sold on there, because having checked out a few sellers, they sell in excess of 1500 items a month which seems a lot for a less well known site.

I'm not looking to rip anyone off . I sell my items in the correct manner, all nicely packaged and despatched the next day etc so I'm wondering if this would be a good alternative to ebay??

Thanks in advance

lovinituk

The plain truth is there is nothing better than ebay. You pay the fees so that you are put in front of millions of potential buyers world wide and those buyers trust the platform.

Lower fees don't benefit buyers so why would they use anything else else? You've already said that ecrater is not good for buyers. Without enough buyers, it doesn't matter if there are no fees if you hardly sell anything.

Are there really sellers selling that much over there? I wonder what the products are? You will probably find that sellers of the same product on ebay are selling even more than that if its true. Or its a truly niche product that you can't find anywhere else.

money_savings_my_game

Thanks for replying

I definitely agree that ebay is a tried, tested and trusted format which has a gazillion worldwide bunch of buyers and sellers. But this can also be a negative as ebay gets easily over saturated and niches become smaller and smaller. Sellers who have been active since 2005 have a clear advantage against any new seller coming into the picture.

The reduction of fees on ecrater means that I can provide a lower price to buyers, which would be a great advantage to me. In my particular scenario I would like to try ecrater alongside ebay to start with, but was just wondering if there were any seller experiences out there.

lovinituk

money_savings_my_game wrote: »

But this can also be a negative as ebay gets easily over saturated and niches become smaller and smaller. Sellers who have been active since 2005 have a clear advantage against any new seller coming into the picture.

None of that matters to buyers and in fact usually results in price wars that benefit customers.

money_savings_my_game wrote: »

The reduction of fees on ecrater means that I can provide a lower price to buyers, which would be a great advantage to me.

As above, lower seller fees mean squat to buyers. What do ecrater do to attract buyers? eBay spend millions on marketing that bring those buyers to your door. Do ecrater do anything more than just rely on search engines? Offering lower prices makes no difference if the buyers never find you.

money_savings_my_game wrote: »

In my particular scenario I would like to try ecrater alongside ebay to start with, but was just wondering if there were any seller experiences out there.

A big part of my business is selling on ebay and amazon. I tried another well known but smaller platform a while a go. Set my prices lower than ebay and the Google searches for those listings occassionally even came up higher than my listings on ebay. I tried it for 6 months - how many sales do you think I had? Zero.

I even set up a Payvment store on Facebook (no fees except for Paypal). Of the thousands of orders I have on ebay, I include an advert on the invoices that tell people they can get the prices cheaper if they buy through my Facebook shop - I've had 12 sales in over a year! I get hundreds of repeat customers but they all go back to ebay and pay the higher price! I regularly do better on my website that cost me next to nothing to set up and I only pay Paypal fees!

I just can't see that ecrater offers anything different that will tempt the buyers there.

soolin

I have shops on ebid and a facebook selling page, and can sell 100s of items on ebay for every one I sell elsewhere, even though ebay has a dearer cost to the buyer.

One question though to the OP, how many items have you or your family bought from e crater compared to ebay?

money_savings_my_game

Thanks for your comments. It's really appreciated. I'm relatively new to selling like this (can't you tell lol) so it helps me a lot.

I see your point about price wars = lower cost to buyer but that doesn't help me or my competitive seller. It just eats into our profits to outdo each other in offering cheaper prices.

More buyers leads to more sales leads to more profit, fine. But what I'm doing over in ebay is becoming quite saturated. So over at ecrater I would have a bigger niche as there's less competition. I'm sensing here that you will say its a smaller niche as there are less potential customers.

My title for this thread has become redundant since I understand ecrater cannot be better than ebay. Might work along side it though?

soolin

If ecrater is free then there's no harm at all in keeping stock on there as well as eBay.

lovinituk

As soolin says, there is no harm in trying these other platforms. Personally I gave up trying the smaller platforms as it turned out to be a waste of time for me and at the end of the day, time is money in business! I'm now sticking with Amazon and eBay and will be working on improving my website. I'm also going to give Play a go at some point as it certainly has the traffic.