Crosslisting on other sites

davidian84

Im looking at using other sites for personal items and selling as a business, I currently use ebay and amazon for business selling. I sell things sold in shops (media/toys/clothes/etc)

I was planning on using ebay and vinted to list things and was just wanting to know if i should list on other sites (FB, Gumtree, Etsy, onbuy etc) or if its more effort than it worth?

RFW

Etsy has clamped down more to ensure the site is only craft/made items and some vintage stuff. I know someone who had their account closed for breaching that. If you sell that, it can be worth it. I sell on Etsy, Ebay, Amazon and my own website. Etsy and Ebay sell about the same. Amazon is about ten times both of them, even though it's not as good as it has been.
I've no idea about OnBuy. They tried to pitch to me a few years ago but I wasn't impressed, I can't recall why. Using Google they seemed to have a lot of positive news stories up until around Easter 2023 and not much in the last year I can find. Their Trustpilot reviews seems to have started to become less positive but that doesn't always mean that much, Amazon's are usually around 2/5 and OnBuy is 4.2. It may be that they would work for some sellers but having looked again I'm not convinced they have the customers, not for me anyway.

soolin

I find etsy quite slow but have never listed in the same quantity there as I have on ebay purely due to the limited things I can sell. It must either be handmade or vintage, which is only a percentage of the things I sell.

Never even looked at Onbuy , and I don't think facebook or Gumtree is really a competitor at the moment for proper business selling. 

RFW

soolin said:

I find etsy quite slow

I still find it odd. I've had some decent sales on there and the customers tend to be on the nicer side. On the downside they haven't sorted out the spam communication problem and it seems to go in waves of sales rather than anything steady.

I think if you can get into the community spirit of it then you can start to do really well, if you have the right type of products.

I do feel like Etsy currently has more potential for me than Ebay but it really does depend on what you're selling. Finding out what works on any platform is a lot of trial and error. I must admit, with some new products and changing times, error seems to be winning out of late!

Murphybear

RFW said:

soolin said:

I find etsy quite slow

I still find it odd. I've had some decent sales on their and the customers tend to be on the nicer side. On the downside they haven't sorted out the spam communication problem and it seems to go in waves of sales rather than anything steady.

I think if you can get into the community spirit of it then you can start to do really well, if you have the right type of products.

I do feel like Etsy currently has more potential for me than Ebay but it really does depend on what you're selling. Finding out what works on any platform is a lot of trial and error. I must admit, with some new products and changing times, error seems to be winning out of late!

I thought it might be interesting from a buyers perspective.

Living in a rural area I buy nearly everything that is not food online.  I use Amazon, eBay and Etsy.

Amazon

i use Amazon a lot for everyday stuff especially for things I need in a hurry.  I have an Amazon Prime account and it’s rare that items don’t turn up the following day, even though I’ve bought them fairly late.  I don’t buy cosmetics/toiletries or clothes on there.  I’ve only, in years, had a problem which involved a small electric item not working properly.  They replaced it twice and I eventually got it to work and Amazon refunded me the money as a goodwill gesture for all the problems I’d had.  

EBay

EBay is brilliant for clothes and I’ve bought some L’Occitane items brand new for half price.  If you are selling desirable things like that then you can get dozens of bidders which pushes the final selling price through the roof.  I was bidding on some La mer items which are normally stratospheric in terms of price and the final bid wasn’t much less than the price on their website.  Sometimes I see a lot of the same product that varies massively in price.  I bought a set of perfume samples for £25.  They are £35 on the brands website and on eBay the highest I saw was about £65.  I wondered whether they managed to sell.  I am thinking that maybe sellers don’t check the prices that other sellers have.  

I've had some amazing bargains for clothes eg a virtually new pair of M & S cropped trousers for £2. I would have paid a lot more for them.  I’ve come across a lot of items which, from an avid buyers point of view, are underpriced.  One slightly contentious thing for me is the price of the P & P.  I don’t know how sellers decide on it but I’ve seen identical items with totally different P + P.  I tend to avoid items where I think it is overpriced.  It’s annoying when the P & Pis more expensive than the item.   Some items are postage free.  However where there are identical items the ones postage free have a higher price which is not surprising.  (I used to work for the Post Office and have a good idea when things are overpriced.)

Etsy

Finally Etsy.  From a buyers perspective it’s wonderful, a bit like Aladdins cave.  I have bought lots of interesting and unusual earrings.  Who would have guessed I need a pair of earrings with a mouse in one ear and a mousetrap in the other or a space ship in one and a planet in the other .   I’ve never had a problem with Etsy, never had to send anything back.  The prices are reasonable, sometimes I think the prices are a bit low considering these are handmade and not mass produced.  I would have paid more for most of the  earrings

So, I hope this helps to have an experienced buyers perspective.  If you would like to know anything else from a buyers experience please let me know.

forgotmyname

Have Etsy removed most of the Chinese sellers with "brand new antique" items for sale?

I used it a while back before it got flooded with Chinese sellers but last time I wanted something unique and
could not find a genuine seller.  Trawling through so many Chinese items I had to give up.

If it's back to genuine handmade items I will start buying from it again.

soolin

No most of the far east stuff is still there, often now coming in from US or European warehouses so they don’t show a Far East address. I had a look at a simple category - necklaces, lots of ‘vintage’ ones with a choice of 5 colours and in quantities greater than 10. The same stuff available for pennies on Temu or Aliexpress type places. 

I bought some really nice T shirts last Christmas with a little motto on them, I could choose the colour and size of the T shirt and having compared the costs Etsy was strangely the cheapest place to buy them, although the same advert was also on Amazon and eBay. They came in a branded factory packaging, not the small business as implied on Etsy, but I was actually expecting that as it was obviously a bigger business cross listing. Overall I was pleased with my purchase and may look to buy again this year but accept the fact I’m not really supporting a small business. 

RFW

forgotmyname said:

Have Etsy removed most of the Chinese sellers with "brand new antique" items for sale?

I used it a while back before it got flooded with Chinese sellers but last time I wanted something unique and
could not find a genuine seller.  Trawling through so many Chinese items I had to give up.

If it's back to genuine handmade items I will start buying from it again.

As Soolin says there's still some on there but it's much better than it was. It was looking more like Ebay a few years ago. I know a UK seller who was using it last Christmas for selling quite a lot of run of the mill items, nothing home made. He was booted off at the beginning of the year and, so he tells me, has tried various ways to get back on and hasn't been allowed.
Some of the Chinese sellers are hard to keep off and it may well be some in the UK making items having bought Chinese stuff. I dealt for a bit in some of the Chinese imported craft supplies and often see sellers on makers' markets selling that kind of stuff.

soolin

RFW said:

forgotmyname said:

Have Etsy removed most of the Chinese sellers with "brand new antique" items for sale?

I used it a while back before it got flooded with Chinese sellers but last time I wanted something unique and
could not find a genuine seller.  Trawling through so many Chinese items I had to give up.

If it's back to genuine handmade items I will start buying from it again.

As Soolin says there's still some on there but it's much better than it was. It was looking more like Ebay a few years ago. I know a UK seller who was using it last Christmas for selling quite a lot of run of the mill items, nothing home made. He was booted off at the beginning of the year and, so he tells me, has tried various ways to get back on and hasn't been allowed.
Some of the Chinese sellers are hard to keep off and it may well be some in the UK making items having bought Chinese stuff. I dealt for a bit in some of the Chinese imported craft supplies and often see sellers on makers' markets selling that kind of stuff.

I agree , it isn't just etsy it's everywhere.

I used to like going to little local craft markets , I went back in the summer to one with a friend only to find stall after stall selling items from Aliexpress /Temu. To get round the often stringent rules of some of these markets they had used their own branding, added pretty little voile bags and made sure they never had too many things out on display at the same time, and were just replenishing their stock as items sold. 

My friend went to buy a pretty little 'handmade' necklace but was easily dissuaded when I showed her the same thing on Ali for about £1 that she was about to spend £10 on from a 'designer' .

I think the absolute worst though is the amount of this stuff creeping into the antique markets - a lot of the jewellery is made with patina to look old- and I've seen a fair few bits in cabinets at antique centres selling as vintage. 

forgotmyname

Not against buying from China, just ordered another load before typing this.  An LED COB keyring light bought to see if it was
any good turned out to be excellent and just £1.02 but it had risen to £2.87 from that seller.  Managed to get 10 from another
seller delivered for just £8.10 (max 10 per customer sadly.

But I wanted Etsy to have real handmade and custom items not mass produced stuff, maybe they need a new category for
those specialised sellers making custom items?

Shopping for antiques will need a magnet to weed out all those magnetic 'antique' brass items.

Thanks