Selling your stuff on EBID. advice for new sellers

val4xx

ksh123 wrote: »

Like so many of you I'm fed up of eBay and I'm off! (Or will be soon...)
So I want to join eBid as a seller. I mostly sell things of my own or that have been given to me (new and used) totally miscellaneous. In my eBay shop I usually have around 30 items listed at any one time.
So my question is - at what level should I join?
Also, is it difficult to swap from PayPal to one of the other recommended systems.With my small level of sales I can't see the sense in joining too many. Or am I wrong?
Its all looking terribly complicated at the moment but then I suppose eBay did too at first.
Any advice would be much appreciated.

Hi. ebid isn't complicated once you get used to it. I find it much easier than ebay. You can offer whatever payment options you want, including paypal. offering more choices will give you a greater range of buyers as not everyone wants to use paypal.

There are two selling levels; seller (no subscription required - but does incur small fees) and seller+ (free to list, free to sell unless you use gallery, and access to more selling features including 5 free stores) Full details on what you get at each level are on the ebid help pages:

http://uk.ebid.net/help_selling.php

The best value in the longer term is seller+ lifetime which is currently on offer at £49.99 , which will last you a lifetime!

livelyred

I know e bid is cheaper then ebay but is it as big as ebay and also is there alot off buyers and sellers on there ?Whats best i dont want my items to be sitting there for mths not selling

soolin

livelyred wrote: »

I know e bid is cheaper then ebay but is it as big as ebay and also is there alot off buyers and sellers on there ?Whats best i dont want my items to be sitting there for mths not selling

People have different experiences with ebid, I think it depends on what you sell. Ebid have just reached their '1 million' items listed total, although apparently 250,000 are from the same user..although I picked that up from tamebay.

http://www.tamebay.com/index.php?s=ebid

I have been registered for around 4 years but have never made a single sale, although I do have feedback as a buyer as i have bought on ebid and resold at a profit on ebay.

val4xx

At this exact moment there are 1106906 auctions listed on ebid.uk.

The very large lister of CDS and DVDs Soolin refers to takes all their listings off periodically to edit them, so at the moment they have zero listings on ebid. When they do reload ebid could be close to 1.5 million

v0n

Something I already wrote ad hoc in one of the older threads, but still I guess it's probably still worth pointing out:

- eBid owns eBid.co.uk and eBid.net domain, but they lost/missed/not acquired eBid.com, ebids.com, ebids.co.uk, ebids.net. All of which are at the moment used by other parties as generic spam sites. From business point of view this is massive security oversight if not commercial suicide. All it takes is for the owner(s) of those spam sites to open alternative auction business (or worse yet - !!!!!! business) at ebid.com and eBid(.co.uk) would effectively dug their grave with own shovel. Not to mention potential for scams. Forget ebay phishing emails - this time "please verify your login details" emails could actually be sent from ebid.com or ebids.com!
eBid had 9 years to fix it and re-acquire those domains and they haven't. That's simply insane. Question is would you let your business rely on website outfit that can't take care of their own business?

- The listing model looks unsustainable. On one hand seller+ accounts seem like a lot of money to someone who wants to get rid of some junk in the attic, and wants "buy it now" feature rather than letting all his stuff go for 99p on website with little traffic. On the other hand £50 lifetime accounts are cheap enough from commercial outfit point of view and since seller+ accounts can open multiple shops and don't pay listing fees or final value fees afterward you can only imagine what would happen if eBid got popular - whole new meaning to item flooding and keyword spamming.
Funily enough - the very lack of interest from typical ebay large volume powersellers is actually one of the biggest advantages of eBid at the moment - you search for "usb pen" and get 62 genuine items, rather than pages and pages of far eastern exporters fraudulently registred as UK sellers from town of "We ship everywhere", England. But should the Hong Kong tat resellers ever wake up to the offer - eBid's model is wide open to massive abuse.

Luckily someone at eBid definitely reads moneysavingexpert forums and it looks like they fixed regexp and wild card searches so typing "lego block*" in search field no longer results in "SEPTIC TANK / CESSPIT - SMELL AND BLOCKAGE TREATMENT" being top hit. Not all is lost...

val4xx

Personally I don't see any need for ebid to own ebids.net, ebiddy.com, or any other slight deviation from ebid?. As Von righly points out ebid has been around for 9 years in the UK. It is growing ( internationally) at a rapid rate, so the business model is looking pretty sustainable at the moment

soolin

val4xx wrote: »

Personally I don't see any need for ebid to own ebids.net, ebiddy.com, or any other slight deviation from ebid?. As Von righly points out ebid has been around for 9 years in the UK. It is growing ( internationally) at a rapid rate, so the business model is looking pretty sustainable at the moment

The one ebid don't own though isn't a variation it is the actual name ebid.com. if you use the web address ebid.com it goes through to a site that offers auction links where even ebay gets a mention!

On tamebay it was suggested that the owner of the ebid.com domain actually made mroe money through affiliated schemes than ebid.uk did on a daily basis.

Takara

soolin wrote: »

On tamebay it was suggested that the owner of the ebid.com domain actually made mroe money through affiliated schemes than ebid.uk did on a daily basis.

Yes, tamebay "suggest" a lot of things about eBid (mainly in the negative) it doesn't necessarily mean they're true and that particular quote certainly isn't.

You have to bear in mind, although Sue and Chris both sell on eBay, the majority of their income comes from eBay affiliate schemes and their tamebay website. They therefore have a vested interest in keeping eBay to the fore and marginalising any alternatives.

soolin

They are also pretty negative about ebay!

wigglebeena

Sold my first two items on Ebid - different buyers on the same night within minutes. Wheee-eeee-eeeee!

I feel good. This could be the start of something...