Top 5 EBay Alternatives for 2010

Author xlxmarketing 22.2.2010. | 10:00

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If you are a merchant looking for a place to sell it can sometimes be tough to decide which location to sell at.

When it comes to eBay alternatives there are many contenders for the throne of internet’s most popular place to sell.

Our list of eBay alternatives, for example is at 60 and still growing as we get comments from ecommerce portal owners and netizens to let us know about new eBay alternatives.

So choosing the best one to sell on can be more than a little hard.

Thankfully, we’ve put together the top five eBay alternatives to make your life easy:

Amazon


Amazon logo

If you haven’t heard of Amazon before there’s a good chance that you hadn’t seen a newspaper or news broadcast for the last four years. Amazon is eBay’s main competitor and enjoys a considerable amount of exposure and ‘through traffic’.

Amazon itself has an Alexa rating of 20 (unsurprising since the analytics giant is owned by Amazon), a Google page rank of 9, gets 70,828,252 visitors a month according to compete.com and attracts 50 million U.S. consumers to its website on a monthly basis.

Third party sellers can share this exposure via the Amazon Marketplace ( amazon.com/marketplace )or Amazon webstore ( webstore.amazon.com/?ld=AZNav )

There are as many ways to get your products onto Amazon as there are different marketplaces with single upload system, a free windows-based inventory system and a flat file data upload system which is used by multiple auction providers like Auctiva or Vendio ( doubleplus.com/listing-your-products-amazon.html ).

One thing to note though is that the Amazon Seller Desktop Applications won’t work with existing listings.

And while the customer base and search ranking for Amazon is strong competition for customers is also high, meaning that listings need to be as search and customer-friendly as possible. Especially if you want to do well.

This site is very much US-Seller centered and, if you are an international seller, there may be certain categories you can sell things under. And while there are Amazon stores set up for other locations (Amazon.co.uk for example) the one that gets the most traffic is the US site.

But with more exposure comes more cost. It costs US$59.99 a month to have an Amazon webstore plus 7% commission (or US$99.98 a month plus 7% commission if you are having items listed on the amazon shop and marketplace).

If you are listing items on the Amazon marketplace as a casual seller then they charge 99 cent listing fee and commission fee of between 8% and 20%.

If you’re going ‘all out’ then you can get a ‘pro’ account which will give you unlimited uploads for US$39.95 a month and commission fee of between 8% and 20% depending on what you’re selling.

So you can see, while Amazon might be easy to list on it’s not the most n00b-friendly selling option out there. Thankfully with lots of sellers using this service you’ll be able to get advice easily with a number of forums being devoted to tips on how to sell on Amazon.

Amazon Summary

  • Strengths: High traffic flow and exposure
  • Weaknesses: High monthly costs and commissions, strong competition
  • Set-Up Cost: Free
  • Monthly Cost:
    • US$59 +7% commission Amazon webstore monthly cost
    • US$99 +7% commission Amazon webstore + Amazon Marketplace monthly cost
    • US$0.99 + commission Casual listing on Amazon Marketplace
    • US$39 +commission pro listings on Amazon Marketplace
  • Transaction Cost:8%-20%
  • Help:amazonsellercommunity.com/forums/index.jspa
  • Find At: amazonservices.com/content/sell-on-amazon.htm?id=hm1 Amazon Marketplace
  • webstore.amazon.com/WebStore-Pricing/ Amazon WebStore

Craigslist


craigslist logo

Craigslist started out as an email list of San Francisco events by Craig Newmark in early 1995. Jim Buckmaster took over as CEO since late 2000 and 30 people now work at Craigslist even though Craig Newmark started it out as a hobby.

EBay acquired 25% of the equity in Craigslist from a former shareholder in august of 2004 but that hasn’t stopped the two companies from legal wrangles.

Court cases occurred as recently as December last year ( wired.com/epicenter/2009/12/meg-whitman-testifies-as-ebay-and-craigslist-square-off-in-court/ ) where the two faced off over board seats.

EBay is saying that the Craigslist board purposefully prevented the internet giant from having a board seat and Craigslist lawyers say that eBay had used its Craigslist seat to get sensitive information that helped in its creation of Kijiji.

When it comes to traffic, Craigslist gets more than its fair share. It gets more than 20 billion page views per month, which is the seventh largest figure in the world in terms of english-language page views. More than 50 million people use Craigslist in the US alone and Craigslist users self-publish about 50 million new classified ads each month.

It doesn’t cost to sell on Craigslist but if you’re interested in selling to a global market it might not be for you as you can usually only sell to one location. While people say it is possible to post multiple times to multiple locations within Craigslist it is frowned upon by management and they will remove ads and potentially ban you if you’re caught.

It’s also as ugly as sin.

Tips for selling on Craigslist include:

  • Including a detailed description
  • Posting a good photograph
  • Following up with people via email
  • Making items SEO friendly

Craigslist is great for jobseekers and OK for people looking for links back to their online shop but not so good if you’re selling to an international, or even nationwide, market. Still worth checking out as it is free.

Craigslist Summary

  • Strengths: High traffic flow, free to list items for sale
  • Weaknesses: Strong barriers to listing in multiple locations
  • Help:craigslist.org/about/help/sfbay.craigslist.org/forums/?forumID=9
  • Find At: craigslist.org

Bonanzle


Bonanzle logo

Bonanzle arrived on the eBay alternatives scene quite late (June 2008 to be exact) but has taken the ecommerce world by storm. It has already got a page rank of 4 an Alexa rank of 6985, and 185,000 unique visitors in January 2009 according to ComScore. Ecommerce writers extraordinaire Vangie Beal called Bonanzle “The Best eBay Alternative We’ve Seen” in July 2008 in her review of the site.

It also focuses a great deal on Google Base, one of the co-founders, Bill Harding, went as far as offering some sellers personal help to set up Google Base listings.

Cross listing is possible from both eBay and Craigslist making Bonanzle almost a nice addative to what you’re doing instead of an instead of.

Setting up an account and listing items on Bonanzle is free final sale fees are between 50 US cents and US$10.

So what’s the downside? The downside is that converting traffic is still far from wonderful.

While it is more than many of the eBay alternatives out there it is still a problem for people who have had sales on eBay and are looking for an alternative.

One eBay seller sold just two items on Bonanzle between December 2008 and March 2009 while selling 200 through his eBay store according to a Business Week article ( businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc2009033_379735_page_2.htm ). The seller went on to say he was happy to stay there due to the low cost of sales and lack of listing costs.

EBay powerseller, John Lawson, was less satisfied ( 3rdpoblogs.com/colderice/2009/07/09/i-got-a-few-things-to-sell-the-ebay-fp30-vs-bonanzle-booth-mythbusters-challenge/ ).

Bonanzle Summary

  • Strengths: User friendly interface, Google Base listing, free to list items for sale, small final fees
  • Weaknesses: minimal sales
  • Setup Cost:Free
  • Listing Cost:Free
  • Transaction Cost:50 cents – US$10
  • Help:
    • bonanzle.com/knowledge_base_questions Knowledgebase
    • bonanzle.com/forums Forums
  • Find At: bonanzle.com/

ECrater


ECrater logo

A free auction and ecommerce store creation service that was set up in 2001. It has gained momentum since then and has got a page rank of 5, an Alexa rank of 3,136 and 1.6 million visitors a month according to compete.

It gives sellers the option to use Google Checkout, PayPal and seems to get the big thumbs up from most sellers and buyers on rateitall ( rateitall.com/i-980263-ecrater.aspx ). Some buyers warn about fraudulent sellers on there so adding a great deal of information to your page and keeping in contact with your sellers is likely to be a good idea.

An auctionbytes survey from 2007 also came up with good feedback ( auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y207/m09/abu0198/s03 ).

It is one of the three site that were first to partner up with Google product search (the others being eBid and Etsy) which means listings are more likely to appear in Google search results. That can certainly be said for unbranded electronics which often have ecrater listings turning up in the shopping section of Google’s new enriched search page.

eCrater Summary

  • Strengths: No fees, Extremely google friendly, number of shopping carts
  • Weaknesses: Poor sellers have created trust issues for buyers
  • Help: community.ecrater.com/ Forum
  • Find At: ecrater.com/

Buy


buy-logo1

Buy.com has been around ever since 1997, making it almost as old as Amazon or eBay. Like Amazon Buy.com started out as a straight ecommerce shop trading electronic products before allowing other online vendors to trade through its site.

It has a page rank of 6, an alexa rank of 776 and 3.1 million unique visitors a month according to compete.com.

A lot of its focus appears to be on electronics although it, and third party sellers that utelize that use it, do sell other items as well.

It’s free to list onto buy.com with final listing fees being between 8% and 15% depending on the item.

According to the very varied feedback on resellerratings (resellerratings.com/store/Buy) people who have had problems with Buy.com mostly have problem with the lack of feedback and support provided by the site’s customer support so if you are selling through this network it would pay to bring your a-game to resolution issues.

Buy.com Summary

  • Strengths: No listing fees, fairly good level of exposure
  • Weaknesses: Site’s customer service poor reputation, you are likely to be competing against the site itself for sales
  • Listing Fees:Free
  • Final Sales Fees:8%-15%
  • Help: buy.com/retail/landing.asp?loc=67282 FAQ
  • Find At: buy.com/

There you have it, the top five ecommerce platforms outside of eBay. For a bigger list of alternatives to eBay visit our eBay alternatives page let us know what you think about our list by commenting below and let us know of any eBay alternatives that we’ve missed and we will add them to our page.


ebay alternatives

Author xlxmarketing 22.2.2010. | 10:00
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4 Comments

  1. Yvonne @ Gopher Promo August 22, 23:52

    Here in South Africa we have gumtree that is really popular, and I use it quite a lot. I never realised that there were so many players in the market, and this post has served to open up my eyes and to look beyond what ebay has to offer. I like the way you summarised the pros and the cons that are associated with the various websites and I am definitely going to look at exploring some of them a bit better. You learn something new every day!

  2. aster Jose September 8, 14:34

    http://www.instantfinder.com provides an effective alternative to eBay or Amazon.
    My criteria for recommending it are its lower charges, no listing or monthly fees, ease of listing items, and free search engine and social media marketing. A member can get a free online store front to list an unlimited number of products without any listing fee or a monthly fee. Sellers simply pay 5.9% on the final selling price on all items, to cover transaction fees, including credit/debit card charges. I believe this is the only site that offers live video chat to allow fast closure of a sale. To showcase their products, sellers can upload product photos, videos and slideshows. Your online stores are optimized for search engines and social media. All these capabilities are free, and very easy to use.

    Buyers are hesitant to pay a seller they do not know. InstantFinder provides a payment escrow mechanism to remove this hesitation. A buyer’s payment for a purchase is held in escrow for two weeks from shipment date for domestic sales and three weeks for international sales. Payment is released to seller when buyer advises within the escrow period that the product received was satisfactory, or when the escrow period expires. The escrow period is two weeks from the date of payment by buyer for domestic transactions, and three weeks for international transactions.

    The best part is that sellers can import their current store from ebay.com, amazon.com, eCRATER.com, or ioffer.com to InstantFinder within minutes. To visit them, go to http://instantfinder.com/.

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