EBay Alternatives, Chinavasion Thinks Outside The Bay

Tired of eBay’s Shtick? we’ve put together a list of eBay alternatives that you can use instead

If you mentioned ecommerce to your grandmother or your crazy uncle Chester, who lives in a log cabin in Montana, then there’s good chance they’d think eBay.

It is certainly true that eBay is the biggest name in town when it comes to online auctions or ecommerce, with alternatives for eBay receiving almost none of the recognition outside of the immediate circle of netizines.

EBay is one of the internets many rags to riches stories. Started in a garage at the start of the 1995 dot com boom the company grew to the point where it’s IPO listing raised $60 million in September 1998.

The ability to buy and sell everything attracted many people, as did the numerous funny auctions (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay#Unusual_sale_items), which gathered a lot of the media’s attention.

Things took a turn for the worst in the last few years with a series of policy changes. Changes which disgruntled sellers who have cast about alternative to eBay suspect were designed to attract bigger names to the company, shed some of the smaller sellers or get ‘more bites from the cherry’.

Here are some of the policy changes that eBay has gone through over the last four years:

• Numerous increases in fees
• Sellers are no longer able to leave neutral or negative feedback on buyers accounts
• Pressure in Australia, the UK and now the US to get Paypal as the only electronic payment system on the site.
• Higher volume sellers get discounts and added benefits for staying with the site
• EBooks and other non-physical items can no longer be auctioned

As a result people have been casting about for eBay auction alternatives and eBay alternatives that could give an acceptable amount of eyes for less hassle and cost.

While traffic is always a concern, there is no shortage of eBay alternatives out there and just typing in eBay alternative to Google or yahoo will give you many results. As will a search for online auctions.

Then it’s usually a case of sorting through all the different listing platforms available and seeing if they are, A legitimate, B affordable and C will give you the right amount of converting traffic you need to make the move there worthwhile.

Here are some questions you might want to ask:

• How long have they been around?
• Are the people on this site likely to sell what I have to buy?
• Which country does most of the traffic for this site come from?
• Is the Internet Site a registered company, with a registration number, a street address and postal address and does it have an operating banking system in its country of origin?
• What is their Alexa rating and/or page rank?
• How many other listings are there in the categories you are interested in?
• Are there are range of non PayPal payment options available?
• How well is their site designed?
• Is the customer service section easy to access and staffed by real people?
• Do you have to actually have to set up an account to make an inquiry to customer service?
• Does the site have a 24/7 customer service phone number and a either a live chat and or an email service?
• Do both buyers and sellers have to be verified to avoid fraudulent practices?
• Can you report sellers of fakes, stolen goods and ID theft or stolen credit cards to the website in a reliable and prompt manor?

Unfortunately not everybody has that kind of time. and while their are lists of online auction sites available like F*** eBay (blognow.com.au/fuckebay/24012/Fuck_Ebay_-_here_are_some_75_alternatives_to_Ebay.html) but they often leave you in the same position, with a list of sites that you need to check before they can even be considered as an alternative to eBay.

Here at Chinavasion we thought we could go one better, and have put out a list of alternatives for eBay which attempts to answer some of the questions that you would need to ask before signing on with any ecommerce portal.

The list is dynamic so we are always interested in hearing from you if you would like to see any site or any detail added or removed from the list.

Want to learn more about online auction sites and eBay alternatives? Check out these great articles:

• Online Auctions Going Once Going Twice
• EBay Rounding Up Sellers
• The WWW Goes Olympics Crazy And EBay’s Gymnastic Reversal

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