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rirvine
Features Editor
Reg'd: Fri
Posts: 225
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With eBay receiving a mixed reception for some of its recent changes, I was wondering what other auction sites people use or have tried and how they rate them.
QXL is set to close at the end of this month but eBid and Tazbar are still going strong. Then there are fixed-price trading services such as Amazon Marketplace and PlayTrade. How do bargains and profits on these sites compare to eBay?
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FilthyRaider
regular
Reg'd: Thu
Posts: 506
Loc: It's dark very dark.......
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Amazon are fine IF you have exactly the same item as they sell. Otherwise they will kick you off. Also the buyers on Amazon are a defined breed. Many do not realise they are buying on Marketplace and not off Amazon itself. Therefore even if they have gone into USED and bought an item they will probably complain because they thought they were buying something new off Amazon.
The feedback system on Amazon is probably even worse than eBay. You can leave buyer feedback, but you try finding it!
As a regular buyer on Amazon I actually avoid the Marketplace sellers because Amazon do offer a decent customer service, and a lot of Marketplace listing are 'bait' - they are designed to reel you into a company's website.
EBid and Tazbar suffer simply from lack of viewing buyers. We get the odd sale on there - perhaps one or two a month if we are luck (although eBid has been dead to us since November 2007 and we JUST this month sold on there). Lower fees are great but no use if you have no sales. Tazbar have also been having one or two problems with billing - they used to store credit card or bank details to take fees by monthly DD but have stopped it. Why? They say they are updating, but I tend to think they have had the facility removed.
TazBar has also recently increased it's fees making it slightly less competitive. We still keep a presence on both but for sales we are mostly eBay, some website, a bit Tazbar and the VERY occaisonal eBid.
As it has been mentioned in many other posts, the eBay changes are to rid the system of the bad sellers - mostly the ones whinging about the changes. When you look at them in full blown honesty, WHAT difference does giving a bad buyer a neg make? You can't stop them buying off someone else. The only way to do that is to bring in a vetting system and them you never sell to anyone and get really paranoid.
The best way to tackle a bad buyer like a non payer is still to file for an Unpaid Item Strike. Enough of them and they get kicked off or get blocked by settings you can change easy enough in Preferences.
99% of buyers are fine. 95% of sellers are. The offenders will have to move elsewhere - so watch out buying on other sites from now on I'd say!
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I loved my grandmother very much.......and she fetched a good price on eBay.
Edited by FilthyRaider (Wed May 21 2008 12:27 PM)
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greysts
regular
Reg'd: Thu
Posts: 17961
Loc: Colchester
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I agree with FR about Amazon Market Place. When buying from Amazon you will quite often see a Market Place advert to buy the same item at vastly reduced prices. Most of them are a con designed to lure you into a deal that isn't worth having.
I quite often buy ink for a Canon printer and Amazon were selling an original for around £8. A Market Place add was selling the same thing for a fiver. Great, you might think until you click on the Buy Now link. Then you find they are charging £3 p&p. No problem, I'll buy 4 for 5 pound each and £3 p&p still makes it a good deal. Not so - it's three quid p&p for EACH AND EVERY cartridge.
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Do you know that we're all in line for succession to the throne? Really?
Well, if forty-eight million, two hundred thousand, seven hundred and one people died I'd be Queen.
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FilthyRaider
regular
Reg'd: Thu
Posts: 506
Loc: It's dark very dark.......
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As a short follow on, I don't think you can beat eBay for some things. Needed to buy some batteries for school to repair a load of stop watches - the school was about to spend just short of £100 buying new ones. Got 60 batteries for £3.85 (UK seller) in less than two days - watches all working!
On the other hand I would not touch eBay when I bought some PC stuff recently. Went to EBuyer and Saverstore, but also looked at Amazon - but as greyst said, only the actual Amazon stuff. All the Marketplace sellers looked too good to be true and probably were............
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I loved my grandmother very much.......and she fetched a good price on eBay.
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