New Online Markets

            New Online Markets

    Just because you spent months or even years working at Ebay this does not mean that they were ever the only place to work. I worked there because they were the most popular and were convinced for the longest time that Ebay was the only online marketplace.

    The experience of the last few years has taught me that this is not the case. There are many other online marketplaces to sell at. More and more come on line each week. Someday one of them will grow to rival the once great ebay. I say once great because there was a time when it was a wonderful place to conduct business. That was before they began to attack the small time sellers. The mom and pop home business owners. They did this with raised fees and new rules and endless restrictions and ebay suspensions for insane reasons. If you are reading this post you are here because Ebay went out of their way to make you feel unwelcome there.

    There are on the other hand many sites that make you feel very welcome. They not only want you to sell at their sites, they need you and the skills that you will bring.

    My advice is to sign up at a few of these sites and see how it goes. I am one of the former power sellers that has found a way to generate four figures a month is sells by selling at other online marketplaces.

    My second piece of advice is to review your sales history. You can do this by visiting paypal. Download a list of all of the emails that belong to those who purchased from you in the past and invite them to visit your new store fronts at the sites that you move to. You can do this mass emailing yourself or you can do it by using a clever little trick I have learned. You can sign up for a free trial with one of the email marketing services and use that trial as a way of marketing to all of your former buyers.  It works great and if you opt out before the trial is over you have reached all your past customers with a great marketing campaign and did it without spending any extra money only time.

    You can also visit sites like Ecrater and Ioffer and the only other auction site online that is seeing steady grown, Ebid. Below you will find a brief video about them and a banner link to their site. If you like the classic Ebay auction format rather than the fixed price format then Ebid is probably where you should set up shop.



    Okay that is it for today. I have added some social bookmarking buttons so please take a moment to bookmark this post or send it to someone else. Thank you and have a good day.

Ebay Suspended, Let's Talk Ebid

    Ebay Suspended

Ebid.
    Not much traffic driving in here.
    No worries, the sellers parking lot looks pretty full.
    Come on, let’s go inside.
    I have been kind of looking forward to this, another auction site.
    Page design is solid.  Easy to set up an ad.
    You can do this for free here or you can sign up for the all
purpose lifetime membership.  At the moment it will cost you 49.49
for this membership.  I do not honestly know whether or not this membership will help you will sales here.  I am not at this moment willing to risk the money until I have more evidence that it is worth it.
If Ebid could promise a quarter of the sales traffic that Ebay offers
then I would be willing to pay twice that much to join.

      Let’s look at the pros and cons of working here.

    Ebid is a Google marketplace partner, but lately who isn’t?

    Registration here is Free.

           Minimum listing fee is Free.  The maximum fee is 0.05.
    Minimum final value fee is Free and the max is just 3 percent.
    That is the good.  The bad is there does not seem to be enough
traffic to promise steady sales and by steady sales I mean at least one
sale per week.

    They use Google Adsense and unlike some sites they offer you
no control over the ads and no share in the revenue.  It also seems
that this site has attracted a great deal of over priced and out dated
stock.  I am not saying that many of the sellers here are lazy, but the
free listing seems to equated in some eyes that it is okay to flood the
place with junk that only a drunken lunatic during a lunar eclipse would
be interested in.

      Ebid could become a strong rival of Ebay if it believed
in itself.  Do not get me completely wrong here, I understand that Ebid
does much better business in his home base the UK than it does here
in America. You could do worst than setting up shop here. Here is a link
if you wish to visit and sign up and try it.



    We are looking for a new place to do business and despite the
look and feel of this place Ebid at the moment is not going to be it.

    Back to the vehicle.  We have a promising place to visit.

    Have any of your ever heard of Ecrater?