Last month eBid sent us a press release which claimed that “eBid is a better alternative for anyone looking to really make a living, or at least a fair income, with online auctions“. We were a little skeptical about the ability to really make a living on eBid, so we asked eBid for a case study or to put us in touch with a successful eBid seller turning over £1000 a month on a regular basis. eBid stopped answering our emails but today we’re delighted to publish an interview with Andy, the most successful eBid seller we’ve been able to find.
Andy is pretty realistic about eBid and although not making a living on eBid is using the platform to supplement his income with a turnover which has averaged around £700 for the last three months and he’s still growing his business. Here in his own words are Andy’s tips:
My eBid selling
My eBid user name is kreativebargains. I have a varied mix of products in 5 stores, the majority being clothing and accessories.
I cannot get into Facebook, Twitter and the like though I know I should, so rely mainly on Google for sales. My clothing store currently has the second highest number of listings on eBid.
What works
For any seller on eBid getting Google right is imperative, titles, barcodes and ticking all the boxes to get it onto Google.
Unfortunately for me, clothing is not a massive seller on eBid although there are steady sales. I have increased my baby items and they sell well, homewares also do pretty well.
Tips for listing – Keep Google happy!
I use BIN for 7 days with 10 auto relists, that means I only relist every 77 days, my listings rise up the eBid pages pretty quick and there is ample time for them to move up the Google pages as well.
I have got the Make An Offer on some listings and have had some success with that.
I have had listings on Run Until Sold but have not found this to be a success.
Traffic
If I was not so anti Facebook/Twitter I would drive a little more traffic myself, but I generally rely on Google.
I do use the eBid forums and this has brought some sales.
Sell through
I’ve got to be honest it is not what I would like, but it is improving. I started with about 1400 listings almost 2 years ago and in my first month had 5 sales, second month 10 and the hovered around the 10-15 mark for a while.
This year sales have always been over 20 and are now averaging 45 over the last 3 months. I have just achieved my 2500th listing, so overall I am just under 2% monthly sell through rate. With baby items this is probably around a 5% sell through rate.
Overall things do appear to be improving recently, sales are becoming more consistant and repeat buyers more frequent, though over 90% of my sales are new to eBid. Viewings also seem to be rising, though bots do count on the viewings as well. I am confident that that £1000 figure mentioned in the article will be achievable before long. I have managed 5 sales in the first four days of this month worth £115.44, with sales every day.
Tamebay Take
We’d like to thank Andy for talking to Tamebay, this is the first time any eBid seller has been willing to show us a screenshot to verify their sales and who really is making money on eBid.
Whilst Andy’s sales aren’t enough to support eBid’s claim that you can make a livable income on the site, they’re certainly high enough to be of interest. Andy is already turning over well in excess of £6k per year, and it looks likely he’ll soon be turning £12k per year if sales keep increasing.
Sell through is very low in comparison with eBay or Amazon, but as Andy told me if you do an eBay listing it only takes another 30 seconds to port the listing onto eBid. eBid is definitely attractive if you have a large inventory but your products are very slow selling as with a lifetime membership there are no insertion fees to pay.
Andy’s experience suggests that despite the widely acknowledged relatively low number of buyers on eBid, it may be worth experimenting with the site again. If adding £6k – £12k turnover to your business would make a significant difference to your overall profits that is achievable.
What we don’t yet know is how Andy’s experiences would translate across different product lines in different categories. Andy already has significantly different sell through rates between adult and baby clothes – tech products, antiques, motors and home and garden may all have widely different success rates on eBid.
If you are an eBid seller and are willing to substantiate your sales (with screen shots of your recent sales) we’d love to hear from you. In the mean time Andy holds the crown as the all time most successful eBid seller Tamebay have ever found.
50 Responses
Well done, and good luck going forward.
Yes well done, never thought so much could be made from ebid!
Be interesting on how ebid sales are when google drops shopping in the UK? As I am guessing this what they rely on?
From Gazza, who is one of eBid’s owners
posted yesterday on eBid forums
“UPDATE – Added another 91,237 keywords to Google Adwords to promote eBid “
lets get real you could do better dumping it all outside your door with an honesty box
@Kreative bargains,
As far as I am concerned, if you make money you make money. Sound profits are all that count. Well done.
I’m less impressed with the Ebid personnel and team though, if I’m honest.
They never email or call. Can you have a word? ;o)
Dan Wilson
i have said before, if ebid can get the branding then they will give ebay a run for the money.
i have been waiting patiently on this happening.
Only needs one big player too partner them and then we will see some serious competition.
Hi, A few months ago I tried eBid initially attracted by the “import listings from eBay” facility. Unfortunately after several months I could not get it to work. The import system relies on Turbo Lister which is packed full of bugs & has never worked smoothly since it was created and even eBay do not offer full support on it. For eBid to rely on Turbo Lister and not offer any constructive support whatsoever is not the right move in a seriously competitive market. If I had some help from eBid I may have been successful at importing my 2,700 listings from eBay. I eventually asked for my money back after 5 months. I am seriously disappointed in them. If they had helped me rather than telling me to sort it out with eBay they would have another 2,700 listings on their site. I thought this would have been worth a phone call or some sort of help. For this reason alone I have backed off. I realize now that they are not serious about competing with eBay. If they were they would have fallen over backwards trying to help. Sadly they did nothing but eventually refund me after 5 months.
I agree that ebay is far better, but ebay was at the same level as ebid at one point,
If I had 1400 listings on ebay, I would turn over around £400,000 per year,
We have voted with our feet and stayed with ebay,
Sales have slowed right down on ebay at the moment, I am going to use this lull to look into ebid a bit harder,
Ultimately ebid needs more users and more listings to help it grow as a viable alternative, so they need our help, and we should start looking to buy on ebid also,
This is the only way we can threaten ebay’s domination on the online marketplace, vote with our feet,
Ebay may then see the loss in turnover, and not put their fees up again,
If ebid starts to pick up don’t be surprised if ebay buy them out, who knows maybe this is what ebid want.
Surely the question that needs to be answered is this:
Why would you put all this effort into ebid in preference to ebay?
I don’t see it. You’d earn far more net on ebay for the same effort. The fees are not the dominant factor, the sales are.
We have always thought eBid put a lot of time into developing/fixing their site rather than pushing forward a usable API to attract the big sellers?
Every month on their newsletter there is a long list of fixes/new features which seem to deal with the the odd seller gripe rather than looking at the bigger picture.
We are a multi-channel retailer and the low fee option appeals if it stays low if the traffic ever increases.
With the right API tools available adding another marketplace (shop branch we call them) would not be much trouble for our 12,000 lines.
The reason people put a lot of effort into alt sites like ebid, is probably more to do with the fact that they don’t like the way ebay has kept increasing their fees when they were already making money.
Secondly they don’t like all of the changes and the fact that it is so hard to get your listings seen on ebay, due to technical reasons and the sheer number of listings.
I am slightly bewildered by some of the logic that I’m reading on this thread.
My advice would always to be ‘platform agnostic’ in business. The level of sales, the level of fees, how you feel about a marketplace are relevant. But surely turning a profit is the only critical measure of business success?
This game is just “flogging stuff on the internet”, at the end of the day. I suggest grasping every profitable channel, and taking the sales.
What am I missing?
Dan