dot COM Report » eBay & Online Auctions

How To Sell In The UK With eBay

dotCOMreport Editor — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:08:09 +0000

Listing goods on eBay UK has been popular with U.S. sellers who are seeking new ways to make money on eBay. The US dollar has been weak against the British Pound, which can buy more of our goods than ever. But you should be prepared for some brutal competition on eBay UK.

The number one problem on eBay UK is there are too many sellers offering the exact same items. If you browse through eBay UK listings looking at products offered by US sellers, you will see the same items over and over again. Don’t list the same products as everyone else, offer something different.

If you list the same items as everyone else at a lower price, eventually, all the other sellers lower their prices, and everyone’s profit margins decrease. This is merely the law of supply and demand. The larger the supply, the lower the price will be. The smaller the supply, the higher the price. If you challenge someone else’s price, be prepared for them to do the same to you.

Try to focus on newly released products. UK customers can’t purchase an item if they don’t know it exists. It may take years for a new American product to reach the UK through the usual distribution methods. If you list it on eBay, the UK customers can learn about it and get it now.

It would not be possibly for one seller to offer every single American product on the market in their eBay store at one time. Some US sellers have been selling on eBay UK for years and never update their product line. You have virtually boundless opportunities to be the only seller offering a product. You may realize that something sells exceptionally well, and other sellers will have no idea what you have discovered. You can corner the market on a specific product if you continue to research.

This strategy can work particularly well If you live in a test market city. A test market city is a geographic location selected for the introduction of a new product or marketing campaign, or both. Test market cities will have access to products long before other cities. If you live in or near a test market city, observe your store shelves carefully and watch for new items. Granted, the new items may not pass the test and may not be introduced into the major market, but, you have a unique opportunity to offer items on eBay UK that other sellers may not have access to.

There are only a few American products on eBay UK, when we have millions available to us. If something isn’t listed, don’t presume it won’t sell. Odds are, no one has tried it yet. You may be the first.

At the very least, present your goods in a unique way. If a seller is offering a product in a 2-pack, offer it in a 1 or 3 pack. Offer an unusual size. Offer free shipping. Offer £1 shipping. You don’t have to offer the item on eBay the same way it is presented on store shelves. Create a set or kit with items that naturally go together – such as shampoo and conditioner, razors and shaving cream, or toothpaste and dental floss. Be unique so that you can stand out. Don’t just blend in with everyone else

Dibzees! Calls Dibs On Penny Auctions

dotCOMreport Editor — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:49:48 +0000

You can’t buy much with a penny anymore, but on a new online auction site, one more cent might be all you need to be the top bidder. Online auction site, Dibzees!, was started by a University of Iowa student, a UI alumnus and an ISU alumnus in September 2009. The site is great for students who are on a pretty slim budget but looking to buy hot entertainment items, co-creator Andrew Wright said. The site includes auctions for Amazon Kindles, iPod shuffles, Nintendo Wiis, makeup kits and a variety of nationwide gift cards, including Target, Walmart, Starbucks and Bed Bath & Beyond.

Whenever someone places a bid, it adds a cent and 15 seconds to the clock, Wright said. It costs the bidder 50 cents for each bid placed. The action generally comes right at the end.

“Basically, the customer decides when the auction is going to end,” said Wright, who graduated from UI in 2006. Wright started the company with Casey Everts and Robert Hu. “It is a lot of fun. It’s really intense as the timer is counting down,” Wright said. “It’s an edge of your seat experience for sure.”

The primary draw for the site is its entertainment value, said Everts, a UI senior double majoring in finance and management who also is earning a certificate in entrepreneurship. “Whether you win or not is in your hands,” Everts said.

Presently, Dibzees! offers six auctions a day, ending between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. each day. As the site has gotten more traffic, they’ve added more auctions, Wright said. Their target audience is college students and women. “We think there’s a huge group out there for mothers and women in general,” he said. “Generally, women like buying online and if they can get things at a discount, why wouldn’t they?”

The John Pappajohn Iowa Business Plan Competition recently awarded the company $5,000 in investment seed money.

“The penny auction industry is getting big and I strongly believe it is going to be the next hot thing out there,” Everts said.

eBay Auction Guidelines For Adding Links

dotCOMreport Editor — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:17:12 +0000

The wildly popular auction site, eBay, has a few rules that are necessary to insure that everyone is playing fairly. EBay auctions enable you to make easy money without having the operating cost or the stress of running other types of businesses so it is a good idea to follow the rules. This is particularly true when it comes to including links in your auction.

Each eBay auction is allowed one link to another web page for information. This web page is to be used exclusively for further information about whatever eBay item that you are selling from you eBay auction. You may, however, have links to more photo images of the merchandise that you are selling on eBay.

Your eBay auction may include a link for customers to click that opens a separate window for sending you an email. You may also include eBay auction links that connect to your other eBay auctions or any of your other eBay auctions stores. You may have one link that links to your eBay About Me page. This is in addition to the link next to your user ID that eBay provides for your eBay auction.

Additionally, you are permitted to have links to your vendors’ websites such as listing services, payment providers, and software programs which eBay considers to be 3rd party vendors.

There are also links that are not allowed by eBay.

For obvious reasons, your auction cannot have any links that link to other websites that offers to sell, trade, or purchase merchandise outside of EBay. Links to any other websites that encourages eBay bidders to place their bids outside of eBay are not authorized in your eBay auctions

You cannot have any links in your eBay auction to sites that offer to sell merchandise that is considered illegal at eBay. Links to websites that solicit eBay user Ids and passwords are also prohibited.

Rules for linking from your About Me are pretty much the same as those for eBay auctions. Because eBay gives you this page to self promote your business, then linking to your website from it is allowed.

Judge Throws Out Ebay Antitrust Lawsuit

dotCOMreport Editor — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:56:23 +0000

The most visited U.S. e-commerce site, EBay Inc., no longer faces a lawsuit by three sellers claiming it monopolizes the online auctions market and the method to pay for goods bought there. The judge ruled the sellers failed to show that they — or anyone else — had been injured by EBay’s alleged behavior.

In the suit, EBay was accused of anti-competitive behavior, including the acquirement of the PayPal peer-to-peer payment service in 2002. Paypal, purchased by EBay for $1.18 billion, processed more than 40 percent of the $52 billion in merchandise sold on EBay in 2006, the year before Michael Malone of Texas first filed the lawsuit.

The sellers sought class-action, or group status, and a finding that EBay violated antitrust laws and illegally restrained trade, plus an award for unspecified money damages. The group was forced to pay “artificially inflated and supra-competitive fees to EBay,” according to a consolidated complaint filed in May 2007.

“We are gratified that the court rejected plaintiffs’ claim as baseless,” EBay Deputy General Counsel Mary Huser said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. “With this meritless suit behind us, we can continue to focus on our core business of providing platforms that bring buyers and sellers together to transact online.”

“Plaintiffs challenge virtually everything that EBay has ever done,” the company said in court papers asking Fogel to throw out the lawsuit. “Every one of the acts identified by plaintiffs crosses no antitrust line.”

Liquidation.com To Relaunch Enhanced Website

dotCOMreport Editor — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:00:04 +0000

Liquidation.com, the foremost online auction marketplace for bulk lots of surplus merchandise from leading retailers, warehouse clubs and manufacturers, today revealed upgrades to its website at www.liquidation.com. Featuring an updated design and an enhanced range of new features, the new site provides potential buyers with faster, easier access to the merchandise most appropriate for their inventory needs.

Further improvements include prominent images, enhanced search filters, and a streamlined bidding process. New members will need to enter a credit card for the first auction they place a bid on, and after that initial entry, a credit card number will only be necessary after the auction’s end. Auction recommendations placed throughout the site help buyers find what they need, as well as detailed “Seller Performance Reports” on Item pages. Galleries, called “auction carousels,” provide an easy way for visitors to quickly browse the most popular auctions on the site.

Liquidity Services Inc. has 1.3 million registered buyers which include exporters, traditional retailers, online resellers, end-users and consumers. According to a research note from Wall Street firm Lazard Capital Markets issued on February 5, registered buyers increased 20% in the fourth quarter year-over-year, while the average number of bidders per auction (a measure of liquidity) “remained healthy at 4.3.”

Android Users Welcome Official eBay App

dotCOMreport Editor — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:34:55 +0000

If you’ve eagerly awaited an app that lets you check the status of your eBay auctions and leave feedback from your favorite Android device, the wait is over. The official eBay app for Android is now available, allowing users do all the typical eBay stuff – search auctions, buy fun things, pay for purchases, check the items you’re selling, leave feedback, and set alerts.

This app should make life easier for you whether you are a power eBay user or just a rare bidder or seller. Most significantly, the app will notify you if you are outbid so that you no longer have to stay glued to your computer for those final critical seconds of the auction.

The application is only available for the US market at this time, but plans are in place to expand that shortly. Incidentally, eBay is one of the founding 34 members of the Open Handset Alliance.

Happy bidding everyone and let us know what you think.

Can Social Media Make Online Auctions Exciting Again?

dotCOMreport Editor — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:29:36 +0000

When it comes to online auctions, most people visualize the lengthy, commonly humdrum (at least until the last few minutes) auctions found on eBay. But in the past year we’ve seen several more exciting action in the space. StuffBuff is a new site that’s taking an unusual approach: it’s objective is to merge the real-time nature of sites like Twitter with conventional auction sites like eBay.

A typical StuffBuff auction (called a ‘Live Haggle’) looks somewhat similar to a chat room, with a few significant differences. The top of the chat window shows a ‘time left’ indicator that keeps you informed of when the auction ends, and there’s a bidding window beneath the chat box where you enter the amount you’re willing to pay (entering a bid is deemed binding). Whenever you set up an auction, you’re responsible for staying active in the chat as viewers come online to bid and ask questions (consequently, auctions end in a matter of hours or minutes, as opposed to days on eBay). And because of the open nature of the chat everything is transparent — you don’t have to worry about back channel negotiations.

Aside from the real-time nature of the auction, what sets StuffBuff apart from established auction sites is the potentially viral nature of their auctions. Any time you create an auction, you can embed it in your website to share with friends. Guests will be able to bid on these auctions directly from your site (they’ll be able to use Facebook Connect or Twitter OAuth to sign up, though these aren’t implemented yet). Payments are made through Paypal’s payment platform.

There’s a second kind of auction from StuffBuff called ‘Blink’ that does have a number of similarities to Swoopo. The auction invites users to watch as the price of an item drops. The more people viewing, the faster the price falls, until someone buys the item. These can be embedded as well.

StuffBuff makes money by charging approximately 25-50 cents to create an auction (which is significantly less than eBay), $1.50 to set a reserve, and then 5% of the final value. The pricing of the Blink auctions is still to be established.

To make creating auctions less complicated than on some other services, StuffBuff has done some remarkable things. The site has a feature that allows you to either plug in a USB barcode scanner or use your computer’s camera as one: aim it at a product, and StuffBuff will enter it into your sellable inventory. When you’re prepared to sell an item the site will attempt to pre-populate your auction’s details with known information about the item, like size and weight.

StuffBuff has an appealing idea, but there are a few hurdles that immediately come to mind. Founder Michael Langer states that he wants StuffBuff to be like “eBay 2.0?, explaining that he sees eBay’s 95% marketshare as an opportunity given that the site hasn’t changed much in years. But establishing an auction site is complex — it’s going to take some time to get users to trust these embedded widgets enough to actually start handing money over to them. My other concern involves the real-time nature of the auctions. Because auctions only last a few hours, unless you have some apparatus to really spread them virally (say, through a popular Twitter account) it seems like it would be difficult to get more than a few people bidding, and even then they may well be your friends, who aren’t always the greatest people to do business with. That dilemma might go away once the site has a substantial user base that will expose your auctions to strangers, but StuffBuff needs to get over that first hump.

Alternative Marketplaces For Those Fed Up With Ebay

dotCOMreport Editor — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:47:57 +0000

Many online auction sellers have moved on from eBay for a variety of reasons. Some had their accounts suspended due to stricter selling regulations. Some were no longer turning a profit due to eBay’s high listing fees, final value fees and, lets not forget, PayPal fees. Others were squeezed out by legitimate competition and, in many cases, by large companies that received sweet deals on fees (such as Buy.com).

But whatever your reason for seeking an alternative to eBay, the important thing is knowing there are other online marketplaces where you can start making money again. Here are a few eBay alternatives that you may want to look into (in no particular order):

Amazon.com .. Although these are not listed in any particular order, I’ll start with Amazon because the are the most successful of all of the sites I’m reviewing. This means they also have the largest customer base. You’ll find that when trying out some internet marketplaces, no matter how nice the interface, or how easy it is to sell, it doesn’t matter if that marketplace doesn’t put buyers in front of your products.

Another welcome benefit of Amazon is that there are no listing fees. Unlike eBay, where you pay a fee on everything you list, Amazon only charges fees for items that are sold. This can save you a ton of money in the long run! Overall, the final fees from Amazon marketplace listings are comparable to what you’d pay eBay for the final value fees plus the PayPal fees.

The remaining websites in this list won’t expose you to anywhere near the number of buyers that you will see on eBay or Amazon.

ioffer.com .. Established in 2001, ioffer is one of the more established eBay look-a-likes. As the name implies, ioffer focuses heavily on the “best offer” type of system. Most buyers prefer to make offers on products rather than buy them outright. If you are comfortable with haggling, then you could do fairly well on ioffer.

ioffer does have bulk listing options and other nice features that make selling fairly simple. One thing to be familiar with is their “COPS” program, which is similar to eBay’s VeRO program, in that listings may be pulled without warning or explanation. This could prove to be problematic, especially for sellers in the media category because ioffer’s COPS program may think you’re offering bootleg copies of DVDs.

Bonanzle.com .. The popular new kid in town, it has become very popular with sellers. Bonanzle is praised for its ease of use, bulk listing capabilities, and an automatic feed to Google products, which gives your items more visibility. However, so far the buyer base is still pretty small.

There is some controversy surrounding the revenue generation tactics that Bonanzle employs. They link to Amazon’s affiliate program throughout their website, which may drive your potential buyers away if Amazon is offering the same thing for a lower cost.

Bonanzle does have a lot of promise and in a few years, who knows, it may turn out to be a strong eBay alternative.

eBid.net .. eBid appears to be a pretty big operation. At the time of this writing, eBid had about 2.4 million active listings, compared to eBay’s 29 million. Though looking at the number of listings doesn’t indicate how many sales are actually taking place. eBid’s website seems to focus more on their UK counterpart, but in recent years the US side has grown in popularity.

eBid’s fees are reasonably low, and you can choose from PayPal or Google Checkout as a payment vehicle. If eBid ever really takes gets going in the US, it would be well worth the cost of a lifetime membership at $49.99. Only time will tell.

This is, by no means, a full list of all the eBay alternatives available. These suggestions are just good places to start.

EBay Shakeup Brings $0 Listing Fee

dotCOMreport Editor — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:43:18 +0000

EBay is about to shake up its pricing structure again, introducing an option that allows sellers to list up to 100 items for free each month if bidding starts under a buck. If the goods don’t sell, eBay collects no fee.

The changes, which will take effect March 30, will affect nearly every transaction on eBay’s marketplace.

“Insertion fees” — the price users pay to put an item up for auction on eBay — will drop as low as zero, while the “final value fee” assessed on successfully sold goods will rise to a flat 9% for all transactions, with a new per-item cap of $50. Currently, final fees vary by selling price, maxing out at 8.75% for items that sell for less than $25 but without any cap on the back end.

EBay is also adjusting fees for fixed-price item sales, a category that has grown rapidly in the past two years. Listing costs will plunge to as low as 3 cents per item for the most active, high-volume sellers, but rise slightly for merchants who sell sporadically. Fixed-price listings will also become more visible on the site, showing up in eBay’s main search instead of being divided out into a separate set of results, as they are now.

EBay fee changes often set off firestorms within its seller community. This time, reaction was relatively upbeat.

“A lot of merchants on a lot of different levels are already calculating their savings and are liking the changes,” said Joseph Cortese, founder of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance, an industry trade group. “I would say eBay struck an overall positive note today.”

At AuctionBytes.com, a gathering spot for online merchants, hundreds of eBay sellers quickly weighed in on the changes.

“I can’t believe I am saying this, but at first glance, I like the store changes,” one respondent wrote.

But others were annoyed at how smaller sellers could see their costs rise. “Why doesn’t eBay just say that they are not interested in small business sellers and be done with it?” another seller griped.

“This is why I have left eBay,” one merchant posted. “The pricing structure keeps changing like lines in the sand because eBay can’t figure out what kind of venue they want to be.”

EBay’s new fee structure mimics one it has already adopted internationally. In a conference call last week to discuss the company’s quarterly financial results, CEO John Donahoe telegraphed the upcoming changes.

“In Europe, we have successfully transformed our seller value proposition and business model over the past 18 months,” Donahoe said. “By offering lower insertion fees to our sellers, we have almost doubled the number of live listings, a significant increase in selection. We plan to adopt similar best practices in the U.S. in early 2010.”

JPMorgan Chase analyst Imran Khan expects the changes to boost eBay’s sales volume, as it did overseas. “For large PowerSellers who list hundreds or thousands of items monthly, the new scheme could bring significant savings on upfront costs,” he wrote in a research note. “We think the new structure could put some pressure on the middle of the curve: sellers who sell regularly but not in enough volume for the discounts to kick in.”

For example, a $200 electronics sale with a 99-cent starting price would currently rack up fees of $8.47. Under the new model, fees would rise to $18. But if the item didn’t sell, eBay would collect nothing.

By Catherine Clifford

eBay Declared ’09 Mobile Retailer Of The Year

dotCOMreport Editor — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:00:42 +0000

The last eBay-centric article to I wrote concerned mobile transactions during the holiday season; the company was quite proud of its stats and had made some noise about them. Now, there’s essentially been outside confirmation of its impressive performance, as eBay was declared the 2009 Mobile Retailer of the Year.

Mobile Commerce Daily is the entity that awarded eBay this title, and Giselle Tsirulnik, its senior editor, supplied quite a number of reasons for the judgment in an article today. For starters, eBay’s sales were impressive, with about 1.5 million items changing hands thanks to mobile transactions during the holiday season.

Then there was a nifty promotion using a Mobile Boutique to consider, the success of the eBay iPhone application, and the introduction of the separate Deals application. Plus, as Tsirulnik wrote, “EBay-owned online ticket marketplace StubHub went mobile in 2009,” and PayPal took a lot of steps forward, too.

All of which appears to put eBay in an admirable position moving forward, since the growing popularity of iPhones and Android devices is sure to have people buying more stuff online in the future.

Of course, there are other factors to consider when thinking about a company’s success or failure, and eBay critics will be pleased to hear that it’s not having a good day on the stock market. Despite getting the Mobile Retailer of the Year award, eBay shares are down 2.43 percent right now.

By Doug Caverly

dot COM Report » eBay & Online Auctions

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