Selling your stuff on EBID. advice for new sellers

Frugaldom

Update from me - end of month sales looking good with some decent, last minute bookshop sales and a couple of sales of other items, so not a bad month afterall. Last day for the discounted lifetime seller+ option, so maybe worthwhile for anybody planning on selling online with their own websites, as the eBid selling platform saves us a fortune in secure servers of our own. We just use redirect and integrate our own site with theirs - ours gets spidered, theirs gets spidered, products show up in G00gle searches fairly quickly and there does seem to have been a marked increase in US buyers.

Still no signs of any buddy auctions, though. Awaiting new merchandise with the new logos, by the looks of things. Wonder if my old stuff will be worth listing? Half a dozen very, very collectable mugs, anyone? :rotfl:

soolin

I wouldn't worry too much about the last day for seller lifetimes upgrades, it's a bit like the old MFI sales, it will finish today and be back in a few weeks. It's been running off and off for years now.

soolin

Actually I have a question as well, is there anyway to see how many auctions currently have bids? What I mean is if I pull up say a page of books it shows the time left to run and the start price but there seems no way at all of seeing if there are any with bids. I did wonder if this is deliberate to hide the facts that actually none of them for pages and pages have any bids but that's just me being cynical. I really would like to be able to glance at a page of current listings and see how many and what type have bids so that I could possibly adjust my selling techniques if I can be bothered to venture back.

Sorry another question. I've checked the categories I usually sell in and it seems to me that there are far fewer auctions than there was before. have the policies changed or is there just less people bothering? For instance the book category has only 16223 books listed and virtually all of them either BIN or list till sold, so they are basically now the Amazon model rather than ebay. Is that deliberate as well?

Frugaldom

Hi Soolin, I just took a quick look at the books category here and can see 205,000+ listings. I have to admit that we list with BIN as it's what works best for us, but I've always considered eBid to be a lucrative alternative to setting up our own ecommerce site. Any passing eBid trade is an added bonus.
It annoys me that we need to list under non-fiction 'sport' section because they don't have a relevant section, whereas previously, when we used to sell on eBay, it was a simple case of listing under the relevant category.

In my opinion, it was a sideways move by management when they removed the column that displays how many bids an item has received but it makes good business sense to remove anything that creates a negative impact on users. I did try to analyse the stats between eBid and eBay a while back and was shocked by the high percentage of items that run to closing without bids on eBay. At least we have free auto-relisting, which is always something.

PS - I don't like the titles or keywords, just downright weird - who the heck are james, david, robert and michael?

soolin

nykmedia wrote: »

H. I did try to analyse the stats between eBid and eBay a while back and was shocked by the high percentage of items that run to closing without bids on eBay. At least we have free auto-relisting, which is always something.

?

I think this is a direct result of ebay actually doing 'an ebid' in allowing private sellers to list at 99p or less for free. That has resulted in hundreds of items continually being relisted with no hope at all of a sale. I started a thread yesterday about one I had found, they had 800+ listings, all at 99p and Steve pointed out that in the past 30 days they had made around 20 sales only. As they weren't paying naything there was no incentive for them to take a better look at what they were doing, instead they just clutter up a decent book category with rubbish which they will never sell.

The main categories though and business sellers are still running at very high sell through rates. I don't expect my business sales to go at more than 10% unsold in a 10 day period. On ebid those same items before Christmas were running at 100% unsold even though they were cheaper than the same items on ebay.

soolin

I've just searched again for books and turned up a whole load more, I wonder where I searched wrongly before/

However there has been no successful sales at all as far as I can see. I'll try my other categories, at least if you search completed you can see if the items sold or not.

FinlayJames

Ive opened an ebid account today, Im an Ebay power seller, the reward for increasing my sales and a 100% feedback over 7 years has been to drop my final value fee discounts from 25% to 5% in the last week... I currently pay out over £500 to ebay a month in fees... so that hurts.

Im opening my own ecommerce site , and Im listing on ebid as I know a lot of bigger sellers are looking that way...

The only problem seems to be the number of buyers on ebid...always has been. Well if every seller shouted about the fact ebid is there then I think it would be advertisement enough... Thats how ebay did it in the good old days

As a seller I can sell for a lower ammount on ebid and make more money... I will use ebay still..I have too.... But I will push ebid and my own ecommerce site from now on if a day comes when I can turn off the ebay switch then I will.

As a buyer....There are some bargains to be had on ebid for sure, as not enought buyers to go around all the products...

soolin

FinlayJames wrote: »

I

As a buyer....There are some bargains to be had on ebid for sure, as not enought buyers to go around all the products...

That's been my problem, 5 1/2 years and one single sale on ebid. Yes I pay fees to ebay but at least the stuff sells quickly and easily. Pound for pound including the time wasted in listing on ebid and not selling anything, ebid is considerably more expensive than ebay. The only thing I save money on is post and packaging as apart from my one item I've never had to bother sending anything.

Im opening my own ecommerce site , and Im listing on ebid as I know a lot of bigger sellers are looking that way...

The bigger sellers I follow and have bought from have all gone back to ebay having seen their sales plummet disastrously after their much heralded exodus to ebid.

FinlayJames

:-) Hello again

Many of our customers are repeat buyers (Business buyers)... Ebay is great at gaining a first time customer.... But our phone sales handle it after that.... ebay accounts for 35% of my sales

ebid...... I know the problems on the site but its worth a punt.... for the long game

soolin

FinlayJames wrote: »

:-) Hello again

Many of our customers are repeat buyers (Business buyers)... Ebay is great at gaining a first time customer.... But our phone sales handle it after that.... ebay accounts for 35% of my sales

ebid...... I know the problems on the site but its worth a punt.... for the long game

I did lose patience after the first five years to be honest, and don;t forget that in the UK ebid is only a year younger than ebay.uk so it isn't 'new' by any means.