eBid have hit a significant milestone in July – the magical one million concurrent listings.
Although in the short term sell through rates have appeared low, eBid are reporting a 25% increase in sales in June 2008 compared to May 2008. A 25% increase in sales in a single month is a very significant increase.
A million is a significant amount of listings and should help eBid gain traction in the UK. Sellers should monitor sell through rates in the categories they trade in and assess if it’s time to start listing on eBid.
eBid still have a £49.00 life time offer promising free listing and final value fees so if the site does take off, it will be worth the investment long term.
New features have been added including a discount facility to enable a fixed or percentage discount on invoices for multiple purchases and a shipping calculator for the US.
They have also announced they’ll be expanding in Europe and will be opening new sites in Portugal, Belgium, Sweden and Denmark in the near future.
50 Responses
not that impressed,
its easy to increase poor sales by 25% its the base
I am very unimpressed with the fact that they are happy to laud it about 1 m listings, but very cagey about revealing any actual figures concerning sales.
How many of these 1m listings have sold through I ask myself? That is the number I want to see.
Ebid sales are working well for myself.
I have listed the exact same items on both Ebid Net & ebay, at the same time, same price, only the items listed on Ebid have sold. They have also sold at a good price.
Geographic sale, New search as made it nigh impossible for the buyers to find my items on ebay IMO. With the knock on effect of having to pay relist fee after relist fee on ebay with still no chance of a sale.
The items that do not sell first time round on Ebid can be relisted for free.
I can also use cheaper payment services such as Google check out on Ebid, leaving me with even more profit.
More & more of my items will be added to Ebid Net in the future.
It took time, effort to establish myself on Ebid Net, IMO it as been worth the effort.
The £49.99 lifetime+ membership as paid for itself, with any future sales now giving me the maximum of amount of profit.
Ebid Net 1 million listings are only taking into account the listings on the U.K. site, where as ebay lumps all the various countries together.
watching with great interest I wish ebid no harm,
though it will need to convince me my time and effort listing with them is worthwhile,
I dont give a flying fig about fees, or lack of them,its if they sell things,at a reasonable price that would attract me,
fees are only expensive when an item is unsold
#4 eBay.co.uk quote a total of 10m concurrent listings on the site at any one time
sales are slow but steady, good feed into google base and no real overheads.
very happy to pack the three or four things that sell each week.
#3
what category are you listing in please?
I list jewellery only on ebid – not CDs as I can’t have the same CD listed in 2 places at once. I sell a few bits and pieces of jewellery, it’s no problem to keep the listings on there and any extra sales are welcome.
Unlike Tazbar where I never sold a thing.
eBid has been going for the better part of 10 years, so could it finally be getting traction? 1 million listings is an important milestone and not one to be sniffed at.
But it’s clear that consumer awareness is low and there are not great expectations from eBay sellers. And that’s a problem. Frankly, as things stands at the moment, any credible eBay alternative should be enjoying excellent growth (vis Oztion) and recruitment should be easy.
But a successful marketplace isn’t built on seller dissafection. It’s about the buyers, stupid. I’d love to know what eBid’s buyer acquisition plan is, how has media coverage been going, whether percentage conversion is increasing (25% more is pretty meaningless: last month we sold 4, this month we sold 5) and hear some seller success stories.
#10
Change the record please.
/not ebid bashing.
pffft… sorry, I am unimpressed.. IF things were really going that well the first thing to go would be that 49 quid life membership ( 50% off!! – or that discount at least)
I wonder how much Mr. Schwartz is asking for the domain name ebid.com ???
Taken from Mr Schwartz’s webpage:
“For example, I have one site called ebid.com. The click thru rate on that site is 80 times greater than a normal site. This is a result of targeting. On 1,000 daily hits, there are more than 300 click-thrus to our two sponsors. Of those 300, one of every three visitors signs up. This site acts only as a middleman and on 1,000 daily hits, we are able to make nearly $1200 a day.”
Probably more profitable that ebid.co.uk 🙂
We are all aware about Ebid, as are probably the majority of larger Ebay sellers, but the average buyer will not be aware of its existence. Rather than spend money expanding into Europe Ebid should market themselves more. An advert every now and then on Tamebay is not going to bring in the number of buyers they need to become a player.
its dead simple
where would you rather sell, in Oxford Street and pay,
or main street ghost town, for nothing!
Must say Ebid UK has 0.6m listings as said by Gazza on his own site. That means 0.4m listings from other sites. It seems that Ebid strategy is just to keep adding more countries. As mentioned above, its easy to gain listings when you start from 0.
Firstly they need to get sellers to list there, there must be something on display for the buyers to actually buy if they go there.
Cheap/free listing helps but need to get their arse in to gear and have the auction copy facility working, that way, with no extra/little cost and no extra work, sellers can just copy their listings across.
The they’ve got to advertise heavily to get the customers to come and have a look. ebay will do their marketing for them with its continued push on High St sellers at the expense of others and their scammer support.
all sellers are buyers though not all buyers are sellers
I want the buyers who are not sellers
and ebid cant give me that at the moment
1 million listings is an important milestone and not one to be sniffed at
Even if 250,000 approx are from ONE seller only ?
I recently gave Ebid a try and listed to laptops on buy now at 10% less than the same models sell for on Ebay. I ‘sold’ 2 and both were non payers. For the time being I will be sticking with Ebay I think.
1 million listings is an important milestone and not one to be sniffed at.
I wonder how many of those are at barmy prices. listed as run until sold because it costs nowt,
that will never sell unless some half peed pillock drops in for them
Just to clarify from #15 – eBid are not advertising with us. In fact, my attempts to get eBid’s management to even talk to us have had no response. The post is purely from interest and the information is taken from eBid’s own public communications.
#22 I bought something on eBid Norf, I wasn’t half peed… although I am a pillock so I agree with 50% of what you said lol
I wonder how many of those are at barmy prices.
Quite a lot I should imagine Northy ?
The seller I mentioned earlier with approx 250K listings has a feedback of [1]
do ebid advertise with anyone at all ? I dont think they even have a google sponsered link
#26 I doubt they can afford it when they only charge £49!! I have noticed eBid turning up alot in google searches, cant remember ever seeing a sponsored link though.
#26 It’s not a case of them paying for advertising – it’d just be nice if they’d send us their news from time to time so that we could let people that are interested in it know what’s going on 🙂
maybe there is no News! ghost towns dont have a lot going on 😈
#26 They have a banner ad with Google Adsense, yes:
https://www.tamebaynew.wpengine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1140
shows what a waste that is then, cos its gone straight past me I blank banner ads out, a bit like road sign posts ,I know they are there, but could not tell you exactly where or what they say
#28 Chris if you are an ebid member you get their monthly newsletter, I thought that was where you had got this item from.
#27 apparently the ebid listings are uploaded to Google Base so that’s probably why they appear a lot in searches.
And I didn’t even have to pay the £49 lifetime membership, I was a member so long ago that I got it for free 😉
#18 For ebid listings I just copy/paste the html code for my listings from Turbo Lister, listing done in a few seconds no problem. And no I don’t sell at barmy prices, I use pretty much the same pricing as I do on ebay. (maybe that’s why I don’t sell an awful lot LOL)
As a buyer though, when I do check ebid, I rarely find what I want so it’s back to ebay.
OK…. but how many sales is that?? As a previous commenter said if it’s an increase from 4 to 5 it’s not that impressive.
What is the sell-through rate on eBid?
I’m feeling cheap, and I dont want to pony up 50 quid. I’d join if ebid was free, that lifetime membership job. (I can rustle up a couple hundred listings.)
.. but that would get the backs of all the folks who have paid a lifetime membership.
I build my fees into my ebay pricing, so there is no incentive to list on a site that is going to cost me money and have hardly any sales for the foreseable future. I can do that on my own domain for free.
See, if I were eBid’s management, I’d be all over this thread going ‘right, we’ll pony up a couple of free lifetime memberships to a couple of TameBay readers, so long as they blog about how their sales go’.
How about we have a whip round and sign north up, We could then set him up with a twitter accountt 😈
#35
tamebid.co.uk is available!
Jimbo, Hitch – good thinking both 😀
too right if ebid had any confidence in their product they would dangle a carrot or two
in the far distant past ebay used to give us lots of carrots and apples and oranges, even a few plums,
we just get to pick around the rotten fruit skip out back now 😆
I’m fascinated by the way people seem so sure that they know what ebid’s management are thinking/should be doing!
I’ve been on ebid since 2003 (ebay did something annoying then too.. can’t remember what it was). Until recently I sold perhaps 3 or 4 items per month and I only really listed because I don’t like monopoly.
Since the last change, I have been listing more seriously and I’m selling 30-40 items per month on each of two accounts. My fees have yet to break the £2 barrier for a month (and that is adding the two bills together).
No, it’s not ebay but unsold items cost me nothing, I can afford to list items that may take a while to find a buyer and autorelist saves a lot of my time.
Advertising? ebid have concentrated on banner ads online, which generate steady traffic flows. Listings with a BIN and long enough to run are uploaded to Google shopping. Over half my sales this month so far (23 on one id and 29 on the other) have been to newbies which suggests that something is working.
Neil H, you had two NPB for laptops on ebid? Your feedback there? Zero is it? Well, would you buy a laptop from a zero rated seller on ebay? I wouldn’t!
Like all sites, ebid has a problem with scammers but they are much quicker to remove such people AND they prevent further sign-ups by the same person far more effectively than ebay. I am one of the very few people you will find on there with two ids and that is because one of mine is entirely for charity and they have let me have two because of that.
The blog idea.. Shall I do it? I’ve been thinking about a blog somewhere.
#40 – ‘Well, would you buy a laptop from a zero rated seller on ebay?’
Personally I’d have look at the feedback and decided that before biding and wouldn’t be a NPB.
Does anyone have any idea how big ebid a company runs ebid? Its always had the look of a part time business run out of someone’s bedroom. The fact the only address (quite hard to find too) published on the site is a a MailBoxes Etc mail box seems to support this (isn’t this illegal too?).
3 sales over night on ebid
4 on ebay.
cost to converstion on ebay is horrendous lately, ebid nothing.
both pretty poor though 🙁
“Personally I’d have look at the feedback and decided that before biding and wouldn’t be a NPB.”
I totally agree – I am not defending the NPB rate, which is a pain wherever it happens but on ebay you would have lost your listing fees. Have you reported the npb to ebid? You will get your FVF refunded and, if the buyer does it more than twice, he will be removed from ebid.
The company is a private one so no publicly quoted shares and I agree that the contact details leave a lot to be desired but the email response to problems is personal, almost always swift and they actually read your email before replying.
I think that the staff levels at ebid are higher than is publicised – there is an impression that it is two owners + one member of staff but I don’t believe it for one moment.
our ebay fees are often £1000s and worth every penny, in fact they are ridiculously cheap compared to some bricks & mortar auction rooms
if ebid could come close for less I would be delighted to use them
but its not sellers ebid needs, its buyers
had a lovely nigerian paster buy 12 laptops one nighht on ebid, fees where around £300, i though darn.
quick email to ebid ( i suspected they would stick to there guns ala ebay as they needed the £300 quid) but…they reversed all twelve within the hour, hence i am at least trying with ebid.
had nothing but good service from ebid customer service wise.
although on balance i had good paypal telephone support this week too.
“if ebid could come close for less I would be delighted to use them
but its not sellers ebid needs, its buyers”
This is the chicken and egg thing – read any thread about ebid and sooner or later someone will say “What I want to buy is never there”.
I’m not going to try to tell you that ebid is the best thing since sliced bread, but ebay, which used to be a place where I had good and growing sales, keeps moving the goalposts. My sales didn’t decline: They dropped off a cliff. I still list there but for me it wasn’t worth the effort or expense of regular listings. At least on ebid, if I don’t sell, I don’t pay. I’m one of those who has been upgraded for free each time a new fee level was introduced so I can’t personally comment on the lifetime fee, but several new sellers who post on ebid’s forum say that they have saved that subscription within a couple of months. Who knows how many others don’t bother to post or even visit the forum?
Well if people want to list with ebay or ebid and had sucess then good for them! Ebid may have worked for some people (and myself) others it hasn’t – well no big deal. No need to make a song and dance about it.
I noticed ebay seems to be secretive about how many listings are UK only, technically speaking ebid would have over 2million listings if they included both countries. The figures are certainly showing that people are choosing to listing on alternative auction sites and maximising their revenue by dual listing. Better than someone who just takes other people’s word that ebay is everything.
Jos.
what category are you listing in please?
It would be easier to ask what category I do not list in, if its not nailed down in my house it will be found on Ebid. 😉 🙂
shows what a waste that is then, cos its gone straight past me I blank banner ads out, a bit like road sign posts ,I know they are there, but could not tell you exactly where or what they say
I go to the toilet or make a cuppa , read the paper if an ebay ad or any other ad comes on the TV.
our ebay fees are often £1000s and worth every penny, in fact they are ridiculously cheap compared to some bricks & mortar auction rooms
For you maybe, good luck to you.
Do you get ebay discounts?
But for the small to big sellers who IMO ebay will not want once they have evolved into an Internet site, sales have taken a downturn, ebay are no longer viable as they were in their heyday.
Geographic sales, New search as killed selling on ebay for a lot of good smaller sellers.
I do not see the point of throwing money at ebay in relist fees, when my items only seem to be seen by buyers in specific parts of the country.
New search is making it nigh impossible for potential buyers to see ALL the items sellers have paid to have listed on ebay.
Russian Roullette comes to mind, will they or wont they be found?
Any of the ebay brigade like to comment as to why –
Some Power Sellers have been given 2 months grace in which to get their accounts etc in order, yet some smaller sellers with a minor ingringement have been immediately sanctioned.
ebid could come close for less I would be delighted to use them
but its not sellers ebid needs, its buyers.
How many times have I seen posted on the ebay forums, buyers will go where the goods are.
Well in my case buyers are finding my items on ebid, paying a good price.
Admittingly sales on ebid are not wjat they were on ebay in its hey day, but then sales for a lot of sellers have become more or less non-existent, or selling for a poor price on ebay.
By selling on ebid I actually am making more of a profit.
No listing fee.
No relist fees if the items does not sell,
Cheaper payment services can be offered e.g Google check out.
More fun listing on ebid, less time consumming
No spending more time in trying to keep up with the continous changes ebay make.
Okay I know a buisness as to change, keep ahead of the times, but the amount of changes on ebay makes your head spin.
Why dont they evolve into the Internet Mall they want to become, get it over with.
Shall have my little say, as a small seller, i used to enjoy ebay, but the changes and the relisting fee’s were starting to cripple me, so i have gone over to Ebid have over 800 listings mainly records am selling of most of my collection, i have been a member for 5 months but only reallystarted selling seriously about a month ago.
I have got my join up fee back twice over so i am happy , yes it is very very slow, but it suits me ,as it just gives me something to do listing looking on the forums ect,(perhaps it’s slow because i have sold all of my good stuff and only have the carp left ???) ;-).
I used to be a regular at the local PO, when on ebay, they thought i’d left the country when i popped in the other day with a couple of parcels .
Perhaps it doesnt worry me how slow it is because i do not need it to give me a living, just a bit of fun for me so it’s different i suppose.