Selling on eBay UK?

If you were thinking of selling any photo equipment (or toys and games)on eBay UK between now and the end of the year then I'd suggest you read this first:

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/sell/oct2007toysphoto/

It's billing itself as a cheaper way to insert a listing, which is technically true, however, the final value fees make eye-watering reading. Safe to say they won't get any more business from me in 2007, serve them right for cynically exploiting the largest Christmas markets...

Ebay is a monopoly, and is taking advantage of the fact.

G

Interesting, but the trouble is what's the alternative?

:

I see a gap in the market for you!
Here in Holland we have Marktplaats (marketplace) which started before e-bay arrived in the Netherlands. They used to charge a flat rate fee for placing an ad regardless of whether you sold the item or not - a bit like the classifieds do. Now it is free for most items, only houses and cars I think have to pay. You can choose to have a fixed price or people bidding. But you do not have to sell to the highest bidder. You can pay a small fee to keep your ad at the top of the heap if you choose.
E-bay liked what they saw and bought it, it now runs parallel with e-bay.nl, but is much more successful. I much prefer it to e-bay, both for buying and selling.
There are several other similar sites around in Holland and in Belgium. All successful.
I'm surprised there is nothing like that in the UK.

In the US, there Craiglist which is similar. There probably are some things similar in the UK. The biggest downside is that you tend to have a much smaller audience and therefore market which could affect price.

Kim

Any rival to eBay in the UK would have to have a fair chunk of money behind it in order to worm its way into the public conscious - eBay has a massive advertising budget on TV, newspapers, etc.

Setting up an alternate market would be easy, getting people to use it? Much harder!

I am not so sure you would be that hard or need that much money to be honest. I am a member of a couple of clubs and there is quite a few disgruntled people that only use ebay because there is no alternative.

If you had some clever web, email and Viral marketing you could target the same people that initially started on ebay (before everyman and his dog started to use it to sell empty promises)

Regards
PaulM

I have seen quite a few try to start including dedicated camera ones. A few photogs from the forums tried to use them but they all died. Even MSN and other major players have tried.

Kim

I really find it difficult to feel disgruntled about eBay because it has single-handedly created a new form of buying and selling that has opened up a market to everyone.

I have sold lots of unwanted items that otherwise I would have had to be messing about with classified ads and all the delay that involves.

I have bought long-sought-after items that would otherwise have probably never been found.

As it is, you sell or you bid and seven days later pay or get paid via PayPal. Done and dusted, only the fees to come out of it.

What's to grumble about?

The sheer excess of some of those fees! I've paid enough to eBay/PayPal over the years to send all their founders' children through college and I've never complained - until now...

It's not only the way that they've jacked up the fees on the categories that are bound to get the heaviest use at this time of year (xmas is coming), but also the way that the front page notice makes a big play of the lower insertion charges without even mentioning the higher FV fees until you go searching for the small print (in the link I initially posted).

While fleecing the gullible is hardly a new corporate sport I don't see that I should condone it with a shrug. My personal boycott (from now until 31/12) won't bring them to their knees or make a dent in their profits but it will make me feel better.

It's a karma thing...

Yes, I understand that, but as a concept I think it's brilliant and has and is incredibly useful to me.

In fact I feel pretty OK with Microsoft as well, without whom we would not have the absolute compatibility of our computer systems and the ability to even discuss this as we are doing now.

I have a feeling that things go so far in many fields and then there seems to be a braking effect as the success is dismantled, basically because it's become too successful. A sort of self-limiting social system.

Any sociologists out there to give some insight into that?

:

I am 100% with hefty1 on this subject. I have become more and more disillusioned with greedyBay over the last year in particular. It proves that a company that doesn't have 'reasonable' competition will be able to get away with whatever they like. I believe that we will always have auction sites - if eBay disappeared then existing/new auction sites would soon fill any void. Personally I think the eBay experience isn't half of what it was a couple of years back - the philosophy of community that was behind it then has all but gone now - eBay is losing many of the fans that made the site it what it was.

eBay was not the only promising auction site back in the day. Here in the UK we had QXL.com and believe me for a while it looked like it might succeed ahead of eBay (and I was so close to buying shares in it!)… and then it had an expensive site redesign and it turned into a lesson in how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It is still around and maybe one day it will rise again.

A contentious can of worms JR…

We would all be using Apple Macintosh computers (from whom Microsoft stole/borrowed heavily from when programing the first version of Windows) and the world would be a much more compatible place! I have never owned a PC although I have had to use them from time to time - "absolute compatibility" is not something I would normally associate with Windows machines in my prior experience.

All the best!

Batty

A can of worms indeed!

I have heard people saying lots of good things about Macs and also about Linux and various other alternatives. At one time I used Netscape...

At the moment I am also using Firefox 2, which has solved some glitches on a couple of websites.

The thing is really I'm not as much interested in the computing per se rather more what it does for me. The simpler and faster it does it the better.

I presume on a Mac you have far less problems with viruses? (Virii?)

I do try not to let 'Mac Evangelism' get the better of me but…

what is a virus?


As the Mac market share continues to grow again (hallelujah!) maybe 'virus programmers' (that's my polite description) will be encouraged to promote their wares on the Mac platform but, so far so good.

Of course with the newer Intel Macs you can have two partitions on your hard disk, one with Mac OSX installed and the other with Windows Vista installed - you choose which to start up from. Two computers in one fast and sexy box (… you can also install Linux) !

Enough evangelism…

Are we all going to boycot eBay or what? Let's show them we wont take it anymore!

It should be viruses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virii