eBay’s seller squeeze furrowing brows, spawning alternatives
It wasn’t long ago that eBay enacted a significant shift in the way they did business. Those who sell on eBay have noticed the difference much more than buyers have, because in general, the changes are rather unfriendly for those unloading goods, particularly in comparison to before. On the bright side, seller fees for a number of low-value items, such as video games, are lower than they were. On the irritating side, the feedback system has been crushed from the seller side, making it so sellers are unable to leave any kind of feedback but positive for buyers. That means no matter what the high bidder on your item does, you can’t punish them. The goal of this serious change is to keep buyers from being afraid to leave negative feedback for sellers. Apparently eBay did some research and discovered that many buyers have declined to leave negative feedback for sellers because they fear the same would be done for them in retaliation. The ideal result of this would be sellers who do their best to make sure the buyers are happy. In real life, the result is there’s nothing to make sure bidders keep up their end of the deal, save for a completely ineffective “unpaid item strike” system.
If you sell a video game on eBay for $5, and are paid through PayPal, you lose more than $2 of that to fees to eBay and PayPal. So roughly half. But what are we going to do? eBay’s still effectively the only game in town for auctions, no matter what other sites would have you believe. In the end, you’re more likely to get a higher bidder on eBay, because there are more bidders and almost all of them are using PayPal.
There are alternatives. We got an email from a place called Chase the Chuck Wagon very recently. This is an auction site that deals only in video games and related items. They claim the fees are lower for everyone, and while there aren’t anywhere near the numbers of items you’ll see on the results page of an eBay search, I was surprised to find cartridges by platform in the thousands rather than hundreds.
I am likely to have an old game going up for auction soon, and when I do I’ll sell it there to kind of test the waters. Have any of you used this site in the past?
Source: Chase the Chuck Wagon. Head below for the official line.
- Free Registration – No Credit Card Needed
- No Listing / Insertion Fees
- Less Expensive Selling / Final Value Fees
- Less Expensive Listing Enhancement Fees
- Free Photo Uploads
- Free Seller Storefronts/Homepages
- Free Auction Promtional Tools
- Free Bulk Upload Capability
- Dedicated to Video Gaming
- Growing Collector/Gamer Community
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There is another yet need for an eBay alternative, even if you are satisfied with eBay, or some of the above mentioned sites. This need is to find a site to sell items that are perfectly legal to own and sell, but are banned on eBay and other sites. Like digital content (as long as you own the rights to it). There is a niche site that allows the listing of these legal but banned items, it is Ealtbay, you can list those items for free, pay very low final value fees, accept payment in any form, and give full feedback about the transaction, give it a try.