Tuesday, September 1, 2009

We walked by the river, now let’s go across the pond.



Before Meg Whitman left eBay, there were lots of changes going on and then there were even more when she left. As I became disenchanted with the on-line auction giant, I became looking for alternative venues to sell my products.


After some searching, I stumbled across eBid. This site is based in the UK (across the pond – LOL!). So why would I want to deal with an international site you ask? Several reasons, price being first and foremost. eBid is offering half off their lifetime seller fee. This deal is only $49.99! There were times I spent more than that a month on eBay.

What else attracted me to eBid? I can have up to 5 separate stores; each with their on name, logo and product selection. On eBay you can only have one store, but can have muliple categories within the store. My merchandise offering are fairly diverse so i like that I can segment them into their own unique store. There is no extra charge for this on eBid, unlike eBay who charges a monthly store fee. Another big savings for those of us who like store style listings.

There's more! I can leave my items listed for as long as I like without relisting fees. I can set up auto-extend and auto-repost rules right in my listings - Set It and Forget It.

What's with eBay telling my customers how they can pay me? With eBid, I can accept just about any type of payment I want. Before eBay locked us in to only excepting PayPal (which is owned by eBay), I had lots of customers send me checks and money orders. In my over 11 years of on-line selling, I have only had 1 customer check bounce and hundreds of checks sent to me. I like being able to offer my customers a choice. I think the more payment options a customer has, the more likely they will be to buy. There are still millions of people out there that are afraid of any transaction involving money to me done on-line.

eBid allows me to post more than one photo, use my own templates, has a section similar to eBay's About Me feature, and puts all the important info about my other listings and my stats on each auction in a prominent place. They have been in business since 1999 and do not constantly change the rules for buyers and sellers. They also keep this consistent, which means less headaches for sellers. They may not be as big as eBay, but I think that they could teach the giant a thing or 2.

Come take a look at my auctions so that you can see for yourself why I've gone across the pond.