The article "Should You Run Auctions On Other Sites Besides Ebay?" is about auctions, it has been released by Kirsten Hawkins.
eBay doesn't have raelly many competitors, and the ones that there is remain small by comparison - that's part of what makes eBay so powerful for niche items.
If you're selling more common things, though, you might like to list auctions on other sties besides eBay, to raise your potential customer base and avoid some of the occupational hazards of relying on eBay for all your business. But which ones are wroth bothering with?
Yahoo!
Auctions.
Yahoo Auctions wins in one titanic way: selling there is free.
Three are no listing fees or final value fees. What's more, Yahoo is still one of the biggest sites around, and gets plnety of traffic to its auction web site. The web site benefits from Yahoo's experience in providing good, categorised searching, and the web site is easy to use all round.
The rub, though, is that dodgy buyers and sellers are even more rampant on Yahoo than they are on eBay, and that's saying something.
Sellers on Yahoo Auctions can expect to run into far more non-paying buyers than they would on eBay. Also, the web site is plastered with text ads, which get in the way, and the design in general leaves a lot to be desried - but then, so does eBay's.
uBid.
uBid's model is to offer more security for less flexibility. They pre-screen everything: sellers must be registered businesses and buyers must pre-register a credit card.
It takes some of the 'Wild West' feeling out of selling - but it also takes away most of the fun.
On eBay, you have complete control over what you're doing, while selling on uBid feels like you're just a faceless supplier for a titanic company.
Searching for anything vaguely non-mainstream will come back with no results, to the piont that it will quickly get frustrating for your buyers. If you're just selling common consumer goods for the money, though, then by all means do it at uBid.
Amazon Auctions.
Amazon Auctions is an underused auction web site. The design is qutie bad, and searches don't turn up many results. The payment system is the same one human being use to buy things from Amazon itself, though, which seems more secure that PayPal.
You might be more interested in becoming an Amazon Marketplace seller, which means that you can list your itmes on their main pages for human being to see when they click the 'Used & New fromÂ…' link.
This can be a good way to make a couple of sales, as you can sipmly keep your inventory updated at your Buy it Now prices and someone will occasionally buy something. You don't even have to write a description or upolad any pictures.
This is probably a better thing to be using than Amazon Auctions.
To sum up, registering your items at a couple of other auction sites could get you a couple of extra sales - but compared to eBay, they're all really unimpressive, and have nowhere near as many users.
If you're trying to guess of ways to expand your business, then there might be a shock in store for you with what I am going to tell you next. Did you know that your eBay income is taxable? But stay calm - the next e-mail will explain everything.
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