Is Ebid any good as an auction site?

Buster_Danog

I have read up on Ebid and they claim that if you pay for a seller+ account your listings will get shown on Google shopping and Bing shopping although I'm not sure what extra views that gets for a listing. The site seems to be badly organised in that if you type in a search in the UK, the items from other countries like Canada are not even filtered out.

I'm wondering if it is really better site for selling only if you are in the US? I am also suspicious of their lifetime membership which is then free of seller fees which you can buy as a one off. It seems they are trying to steer UK customers towards that offer without giving them a chance to find out if the site works for them. For example once you have paid per month for the seller+ account then the lifetime membership with free seller fees offer would be double the price. It almost looks like they want a lump sum because they know sellers might not stick around for more than a few months to a year.

I hope I'm wrong and some people have had positive experiences, but it looks like the website could be much better than it is.

soolin

There is a very long running thread on ebid that users used to bump - but the MSE search doesn't work for me so I can't link to it.

However, (and I am prepared for the hate pms once I post this again) it is the only site I have ever lost money on!  I joined ebid in about 1998 - before even ebay UK was launched and fell for the whole 'half price life membership' statement so I paid up- despite running shops on there for several years, uploading as much as I did to ebay - I never even took enough to cover my membership payment. You have identified the issue that I overlooked in my naivety back in the 1990s, they make money not on auction sales but on selling life membership.

Ebid used to be a bit more useful in the US but I am on a lot of US forums and most of the time now sellers warn against signing up as it appears to be becoming less popular there as well.

I personally cannot recommend the site.

Buster_Danog

Oh well. In that case I might give it a try for a month instead and see what happens. I didn't know that lifetime offer had been running for that long. I guess it is the website owners way of throwing in the towel in terms of acknowledging sellers won't make enough sales so that ebid could make money off the members over the longer term. It's a shame that they have a platform set up, but the layout doesn't look better. 

soolin

I am always prepared to give sites a second chance if I think there is hope, but ebid had a lot of second chances for me and it never improved, I think it is sensible to use the free option and see how you get on though before committing to paying a membership.

With regards to second or third chances I am currently trying etsy again after a break and have had a few high end sales on there, and due to that have listed more items- so I shall see how that goes.