Alternatives to ebay

soolin

southerly wrote: »

Ebays listing offers have only been to selected people. I used to sell a lot but not at all since December, I have not received any listing offers since then , it would have worked to tempt me back to selling. On Amazon it is a lot quicker to list items, as you do so it calculates for you how much you will actually receive, & there is no listing fees or having to relist items.

Do you regularly check your offers under 'all selling' as ebay don't always send a message or an email now and just out the offer in there to be accepted.

Brooker_Dave

soolin wrote: »

I then checked out a few paid for sites but the costs start to build up if you want all the bells and whistles . Probably great if you have high end items to sell, but for me with sub £10 items it is actually cheaper to sell on eBay at the moment.

There are plenty of good pair for online shops for £10 a month, that get you a professional website and visibility.

soolin wrote: »

It is still something I have plans to do at some point purely to spread my selling . I was using a facebook site quite successfully mainly to the US but managed to get banned for once again trying to warn people about a scam in progress (the usual one, they have the new iPhone for sale and it can be sent to the UK complete with customs clearance for £500, all they wanted was £75 down by bank transfer to a UK bank account - for the buyers convenience- to pay the deposit, customs, tax and shipping , the rest to be paid on delivery. ). The admin on that one was in the US and warned me once that I was over reacting as a bank transfer was safe, but when I argued that in the UK it is not safe for the buyer she banned me.

Nice.

Groups can be run by loons though.

If FB payments, as rolled out in the US, is rolled out here FB could really take some business from ebay and paypal.

Plus if it works worldwide getting bank transfers off Americans will become something that actually happens.

Jimjams00_2

Have you tried Gumtree, Facebook, Craigslist, Amazon?

I know ebay is not perfect but none of them are. But what you get for your money is access to the world and a platform that already exists. Can you imagine trying to create your own ebay?

RFW

Brooker_Dave wrote: »

Free websites look like free websites, and will scare off customers.

Either do it properly or don't bother.

Check out tictail.com. You have to pay one Euro a month for your own domain, if you do that I defy anyone to think that looks cheap or unprofessional.

It fulfills all the criteria of security and is very user and customer friendly. I've certainly not had any problems with getting or retaining customers.

RFW

Brooker_Dave wrote: »

Too many people trying sell the same stuff to the same people.

You only sell something online if you happen to be cheaper than the cheapest man on ebay/amazon.

You make a loss, ebay/amazon/paypal/banks still get 20%

Nation of busy fools.

I said there were a number of niche sites coming up. Ones that seem to get customers and are not price driven. Notonthehighstreet, Yumbles are a couple that spring to mind, they're both marketplaces. There are quite a lot springing up that have no high street presence and aren't necessarily marketplaces.

RFW

Garethgrew wrote: »

Where is the best place to get a free website these days?

Apart from the aforementioned Tictail, there's also GoSpaces.
These are shop sites.
Not sure about non-shop websites beyond Wordpress.
You'll always end up paying for a domain name but in the great scheme of things that's often peanuts. I think I paid under £10 for having my website up and running to a direct domain and getting new customers.

I recently came into contact with someone who'd paid £16k for a website for a business start-up. There was no surface difference between theirs and mine on Tictail. I'd also had more sales in the first few months than they did.

AG47

Openbazaar is going to change the world
eBay are very scared

Imagine free and international with no restrictions or currency exchange problems only Bitcoin for all transactions

lovinituk

Garethgrew wrote: »

The best idea is have your own website, advertise on eBay or Amazon and smart buyers will look to buy cheaper direct from you discounting all the greedy fees.

It's not as simple as that, apart from the fact that you can't actually advertise your own website directly on Amazon or eBay. With every eBay order we send a 10% off code for our website (our website prices are the same as our eBay prices). We've been doing this for the last 4 or 5 months and do around 50 - 100 sales a day on eBay.

Out of those thousands of eBay sales, the 10% off code has been used.... once!!

We've had plenty of repeat buyers but it appears they would rather pay the extra 10% for the security of buying through eBay.

forgotmyname

I always lookout for the email address and try to see if they have a website on the domain.

Usually there is, but sometimes they have nothing and i think what a waste, why buy a domain and not have a simple homepage at least?

ballisticbrian

Alternatives to eBay? Put item(s) in a skip. Get a job that pays minimum wage and do a couple of hours.