It is no secret that eBay is the biggest online auction market with the greatest number of buying visitors of any auction site in business. It also arguably offers the greatest variety of goods; nevertheless, increasing seller unhappiness has and continues to draw sellers away from eBay and gives many others pause to consider finding a new "home." Whether you are happy or not, you may have asked yourself if there are any practical eBay alternative sites or other marketplaces to take or expand your business. As for eBay, good opinion or not, it continues to thrive making money hand over fist and hoards of new sellers launch hundreds, if not thousands, of new auctions every day. Be that as it may, if you are thinking of striking out into new territory, this article will attempt to guide you toward realistic alternatives.
Are there viable alternative to selling on eBay? As I mentioned above, "yes," and people are making money in these other venues, but it is very important to keep in mind that not all marketplaces behave the same way. They are all different, have their own characteristics, and their own kind of traffic. That is to say, one marketplace may favor certain categories over others and the kind of visitors it gets may generally prefer certain kinds of goods over others. Moreover, goods that tend to sell well on auction sites may not do so well in non-auction ecommerce venues. Because of this, it may be necessary to experiment and test each site to determine which items will do well and how to best present your range of products.
Selling products online loosely falls under the large category of ecommerce, and when you are looking for eBay alternatives, you are basically going to be researching auction sites and non-auction sites. Broadly speaking, non-auction sites fall into three categories, merchant program sites, classified ad sites, and your own ecommerce site. When considering marketplace possibilities, it is important to remember that each kind of marketplace has its own characteristics.
If you plan on replacing eBay, then ideally you will want a site with as much buyer traffic, name recognition, and reach as eBay plus lower fees plus a management more attentive to the needs of sellers. To my knowledge there is no other auction site that gets as much traffic as eBay and commands as much market share. The only market environment that competes with eBay for traffic, revenue, and name recognition is Amazon.com. According to my own research, Amazon's seller fees are much lower than eBay, but it is also a much different kind of marketplace. If you haven't considered Amazon before, go see for yourself. The link to the merchant program is at the bottom of the page. I have no direct experience with management behavior towards its merchants, though it is reputed to be more sympathetic than eBay.
Two other non-auction alternatives include Blujay.com and eCrater.com. Both Bluejay and eCrater provide the seller with an already existing marketplace and both provide a free means of building an online store on which to list products. Bluejay actually submits your listings to Google Product Search, and eCrater allows you to import your eBay products into your eCrater store. The cost of listing on these services is also much less than eBay, and there is no reason why you can't continue to list on eBay as well as other venues. A moment ago I mentioned Google Product Search (
http://www.google.com/products); this is another service that allows free listing of your products. This would also be a resource to use if you have an eBay store or your own privately hosted ecommerce store. You can find out how to sign up and list products at
http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/products/submit.html.
There is no shortage of auction sites, and though I don't want to discourage you from playing the field, keep in mind that many of these sites will have only a tiny amount of traffic. For that reason, you may want to start out by giving your attention to sites that currently have good market share and solid traffic numbers. One such site is Overstock.com (
http://auctions.overstock.com/ ). Although not as big as eBay or Amazon, Overstock is big business and has been selling low cost goods for many years. Overstock may not be known to you as an auction venue, but it is, and certainly one of the eBay alternatives you should look into. One of the other big names in online auction is Ubid.com. Again, not as big as eBay, but this should also be on your list of options. Site promo reports Ubid has 5 million members, so this is large scale business. If you are unhappy with eBay--or even if you are not--there are hosted ecommerce additions and alternatives with which you can expand your business.
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