Making a Living from Your eBay Business (2nd Edition)

While eBay is far and away the largest online auction site today, it's not the only one. You can use several other online auctions, many of which feature lower fees than you pay to eBay. (Some even let you list for free!)

Know, however, that these sites have a lotand I mean a lotfewer members than does eBay. Fewer members means fewer potential buyers, and fewer potential buyers typically means fewer sales and lower selling prices. That might not be the case in all categories, of course, and a lower sales rate might be offset by a lower fee structure. You'll need to evaluate the potential of these sites personally, to see if they offer anything for you.

Amazon.com Auctions

Amazon.com Auctions (auctions.amazon.com) is just one component of the massive Amazon retailing megasite. You know Amazon as a great site to buy stuff; the fact that it also runs an online auction site might come as a bit of a surprise. But auctions it does run, as you can see in Figure 29.1.

Amazon's auction fees are quite affordable. You pay just a dime to list an item, no matter what the starting bid price. (eBay listing fees start at $0.20 and go up to $4.80, depending on the starting price.) Naturally, Amazon also offers a number of listing enhancements at additional cost, such as boldface and featured placement, but they're easily skipped.

Final value fees (what Amazon calls payment fees) are also more affordable than eBay's. You pay 25 cents per listing plus 5% of the final price. This fee includes the payment transaction through the Amazon Payments system, which means the 5% fee is the same as eBay's 5.25% final value fee plus the 2.9% PayPal fee. Do the math, and you see that Amazon is significantly lower priced for sellers than eBay iseven if Amazon's 5% fee is on the selling price plus shipping and handling fees.

ArtByUs

If you sell original artwork, you probably want to check out ArtByUs (www.artbyus.com), an online auction site specifically for artists. As you can see in Figure 29.2, ArtByUs is like an eBay auction that specializes exclusively in original artwork. It's still relatively new, so it may or may not work for you, but many artists have achieved good initial results.

ArtByUs charges no listing fees and no final value fees. It does charge for listing enhancements, such as Featured and Bold. Obviously, the volume isn't near as large as eBay's; on any given day, only a few thousand items were listed. (Of course, that makes your item stand out even more!)

Bidville

Bidville (www.bidville.com) is another eBay-like online auction site. As you can see in Figure 29.3, it offers merchandise in many of the same categories as offered on the eBay site. On a recent day, close to a million items were listed75% of which were in the Sports & Memorabilia category.

You can list any item on Bidville free of charge; this site doesn't charge any listing fees. Final value fees (what Bidville calls final success feesa nice positive attitude, that) run 5% for items up to $25.00. For items between $25.01 and $1,000.00, you pay $1.25 plus 2.5% of the amount over $25.00. For items over $1,000.00, you pay $25.63 plus 1% of the amount over $1,000.00.

iOffer

iOffer (www.ioffer.com) is an auction site that isn't an auction site. Unlike the traditional online auction format, iOffer (shown in Figure 29.4) is based on the principles of negotiation. That is, you list an item for sale, a buyer makes you an offer, and you decide to accept or decline the offer. You can go back and forth with a potential buyer until you find an agreeable selling price.

The site doesn't charge any listing fees. Final value fees range from $0.50 (for items under $4.99) to 5% (items priced from $25.00$99.99), with lower rates for higher-priced items. On a recent day iOffer had almost a half-million items listed for sale.

whaBAM!

The newest competitor in the online auction space is whaBAM! (www.whabam.com), shown in Figure 29.5. This site doesn't charge any listing fees; instead, you pay 1% of your final selling price, or a maximum of $25. If you're a heavy seller, you can opt for the Fee Buster service, which charges a single monthly $49.99 fee for an unlimited number of transactions. So far, whaBAM! doesn't seem to have generated much traction, with the number of items listed hovering below 25,000.

Yahoo! Shopping Auctions

The auction site that's number two (to eBay's number one) is Yahoo! Shopping Auctions (auctions.yahoo.com). As shown in Figure 29.6, Yahoo! Shopping Auctions looks and feels a lot like eBay, and its auctions work pretty much the same way, toobut without listing or final value fees. That's right, Yahoo! Shopping Auctions, which started out by charging lower-than-eBay fees, is now completely free to buyers and sellers. (It still costs to accept PayPal payments, however.) Pretty temptingeven if the volume level is several orders of magnitude below what you're used to with eBay.