eBid’s plans for 2015

29 Responses

1. A free T-shirt, that is… amusing.

   Will keep an eye on ebid, but the lifetime subscription just screams a lack of longterm expectations from the platform despite the fact they’re been around a while now.

2. Is this relatively low ebid sale record a reflection of google search?

   ebid only seems to pop up when you view google shopping. Who ever views google shopping though?

   On generic search ebay wins every time. Ebay has a far higher generic search ranking than ebid by several pages or more which has to be as a result of their respective levels of interest.

   The only way I can see ebid working is if you build your own website dedicated to a niche market which receives a good google ranking and brings in the traffic, and which points to ebid which contains your product. This might be a low cost way of running an ecommerce operation.

3. I have been a seller for just over two years now and my sales increase month on month – well worth the £49.99 in my opinion. With low Final Value Fees to pay – it’s a no-brainer… ebay is history to me!

4. i remember when they came within days of selling the business to another outfit for a shed load of cash but the bubble burst on the dot com world and they have been in terminal decline ever since. I do wonder why they keep going but they must be given credit for a never say die attitude.

5. My £49 for lifetime membership is about one twentieth of my annual fees from eBay, over a period of many years. I have recouped it several times over.

   I have also had no “lost” parcels, or non-payers on eBid.

   It looks like a bargain to me, and continues to grow every year, making it an ideal long-term alternative.

   And the people are so friendly!

6. Agree with John and Madelaine; having sold on other sites I find I get just as many sales on eBid, plus I get to keep most of my profits, which can’t be said for too many other selling venues these days. The forums are a great place to make new friends and get help with eBid related concerns and the support staff is super helpful. I predict eBid will be bigger and better than ever in the coming year.

7. We bet That your approx £1000 a year ebay fees sells you an awful lot more than x20 your ebid listings

8. eBid is fantastic! Since signing up in the middle of last year, sales have grown and grown, so much in fact that I’ve been able to move half of my products from eBay to eBid and am paying much less in fees and thus my margins have increased significantly, and for someone who does this for a living wage has been a God send! I can’t thank the site or the team enough. I urge anyone to give it a try, if you’re serious about selling, £49.99 is nothing for a lifetime membership and you can list as many items as you want FOR FREE!! If they don’t sell, well it hasn’t cost you anything… no “listing fees” to pay every month! On top of that, you’re treated well, no daft “defects”, buyers can;t get away with leaving bad reviews that can seriously affect a business like they can on eBay!

9. I sold on ebid for just under a year, complete waste of time. Same inventory, both websites, I kid you not, turnover on ebid was something like £10 for every £10000 I made on ebay.

   I’m going to put this bluntly: ebid is a dumping ground for failed sellers who couldn’t even make a penny profit on ebay. The forums are friendly and full of ever so enthusiastic hobby sellers happy to make £23 a month selling old postage stamps and postcards for 13p or whatever, but as a serious ecommerce platform to make money, ebid completely and utterly fails.

   Some of the replies on this thread are as delusional as those in the ebid forums. As much as you may resent ebay (that wicked evil OTHER website), eBid will not grow, it will not overtake ebay, and even failed ebay sellers won’t emigrate en masse like a lemming horde over to ebid.

   Would anyone celebrate on ebay seller forums if someone made a couple hundred pounds to go on a trip? No. But over in ebidland, its a front page event worthy of congratulations and another round of slagging off how evil ebay is.

10. Right, this failed seller is leaving this conversation. I’ve never claimed anything that wasn’t true. I’ve never claimed a living wage – I make about £50 a month in small sales spread over eBid & Etsy, with the lion’s share coming from eBid.

    I accept that inflated claims don’t help eBid’s cause but being insulted is not on my list of things I enjoy.

11. They’re not helpful at all, most of the comments above are completely right and Killjoy’s is over the top promotion. They have not gone from strength to strength at all.The only way you save money on that site compared to eBay is thanks to the awfully cheap 1p starting prices for collectors cards, stamps and I’ve even seen a seller accept every single 25p offer on his DVDs, where in hell do you get DVDs for under 25p and be happy to sell them on there?

    If they sold them on eBay, they would sell for around £1.99 to a lot more each plus postage. Sure, eBay will take their 10% or 11% away from the total as well as an affordable monthly shop fee that covers double the amount of listings you would have been able to list, so say 50p or so per item sold, you’re still left with £1.49 per sale! Even at a wholesale auction starting at 99p on eBay they would sell at over £1 each, because I used to sell them and I rarely won an auction at my acceptable purchase price of £1 each. Yes eBay lie to their sellers, they favour their buyers and bigger sellers and I didn’t leave because I wasn’t selling anything, I left because all year last year their live support lied about how their new system would affect sellers’ TRS, they even made a video podcast just full of lies about the whys and hows.

    They refused to inform buyers of the change because it would “affect how they would score sellers” AND they were tricking buyers into opening cases when all they wanted to do was ask a question. The amount of buyers that were shocked that each of those cases would count as a hidden negative score that can never be removed.

    So over the course of the whole of last year, I was constantly assured by their live team (and I have kept all of the transcripts as evidence) that we can request the cases to be removed, that it would have no impact on any sellers’ Top Rated Status until November, and refused for many months to listen that they’re tricking buyer into opening a case through the messaging centre, they even allowed a buyer to open a case on me 1 day after the listing ended, and all he thought he was doing was asking me how long the item would take to arrive.

    They did eventually sort out the opening of cases AFTER August, and everything I was told by eBay CS turned out to be complete tosh because come September, they stole many sellers’ TRS off of them, in turn gaining back their 15% loss in discounts from the not so big companies and when questioned, they refused to give an explanation.

    Then started the reduction of listings, so month after month without warning that it WILL happen (instead they only stated it MAY happen in a message), they reduced the listings to the point it would have taken another 5 months to get back to Above standard, they got rid of standard status completely, it goes from Below Standard to Above Standard and vice versa, turned Neutral feedback into more hidden negative that they refuse to remove, even if the buyer removes the comment and replaces it with a positive one, they refused to accept that they were in the wrong for allowing buyers to open cases through the messaging centre, literally there was a section that recommended they contact the seller first, with contact the seller being highlighted so naturally buyers clicked it thinking they were just contacting the seller, they even posted on the page that the first step of communicating with a seller was through the resolution centre.

    Then there’s the two-facedness of their policies against making profits from postage fees, yet they were doing it ever since they partnered with Royal with both eBay and Paypal, taking a massive cut of a combined 13.4% of the postage charges as well as making profits from the heavily discounted prices they were receiving from RM. When asked about this, their only response every time was that it was perfectly legal . That’s when I decided to buy the stamps straight from the local small business Post Office down the Road. Think about it, if you post more than 50 items per week through Royal Mail, you can register a business account to get lower postage charges, the more you post through them, the cheaper Royal Mail charges them, yet we never see the benefit of these cheaper prices when purchasing postage labels through eBay or PayPal and PayPal only offers the most expensive RM options for everything, including overseas.

    Then on top of that, 2 years ago they started to charge their 10-11% on seller’s postage charges, forcing the costs up even higher, and no, Buy it Now with Free postage isn’t cheaper, because the postage is always added to the total price with even extra thrown in and buyers are “so happy” that they are receiving “FREE” postage, what a joke. And the more a buyer uses Buy it Now with a single seller, the more profit the make with the extra postage charge that nobody can ask for back because it looks free.

    Then last August came the change to private sellers’ charges and listing fees. They dropped the free listing allowance from 100 items and I think 10p per listing thereafter (it was a while since I used a private account) all the way down to 20 free listings and 35p per listing thereafter. Then they sent an email out to the private users, including my buying account, that they have made changes that will benefit us!

    All of this was aimed at pushing semi-medium sellers out to leave room for the big and giant sellers, especially from China, they’re heavily promoted and get away with murder on there.

    Last year I was paying an average of £650 a month (total annual fees/12) in fees to eBay and was only allowed to list 200 items a month and I was happy to pay them. But after September when they used everything they’ve done over the year to build up to this, they started to reduce the sales which started to show less and less and by November I just had enough of how much they were trying to ruin business for their sellers and how disrespected I felt through a year of lie after lie, especially with how much I was paying them and how much I could have potentially paid them. I hardly received any negative feedback out of the 2000+ sales last year, everything they did to my account was because they changed the way they they were judging sellers status, with zero mention to any of the buyers and they just kept building up the question/cases against me, used any neutral and negative against me, even those acquired before we were even warned about the changes, and for even smaller sellers it was calculated all the way back from August 2012-August 2013 (They only told us around April time, yet they counted records from 8 months prior to any message from them) which made the smaller sellers’ percentage at the time look a lot worse than they should have.

    Although annoyed at the ever increasing charges, it was still worth every penny when you think the charges were 14.4%+, it sounds expensive when you put the charges into money but you have to take into account that that was only 14.4% of what you sold meaning there’s a whole 85.6% that was taken to pay for it. It wasn’t the charges that made me refuse payment and migrate, essentially suspending my account for a while as I tested the waters elsewhere. It was all of the above and more.

    Ecrater fetched about 50 sales in 6 weeks, Etsy only 12 in the same amount of time and then there is eBid. I opened an eBid account back in 2011 at the same time as my eBay account and sales have always been better on eBay, so I gave up listing anything on eBid for a while. Then comes around January 2015, I paid a subscription until April for their free listings and such and since the beginning of January I have made a total of 3 sales, 2 of which weren’t even paid for and eBid never showed me any option to reclaim the final value fees. I followed the correct procedure, waited the correct amount of time and a few days extra, but the buyers weren’t even responding. So I decided to cancel the sales, mark the buyers as non paying bidders and left them both Negative feedback. Curiously enough the negative for the very first non payer was removed almost instantly, so I posted another to their account which still remains there, but never was an option shown in the drop down menu to reclaim the charges. Then eBid just took the charges straight from my bank. Admittedly, it wasn’t very high but it did still strike a light over my head. I turned the light off for a while and continued promoting the site, by publishing my own and a lot of other sellers through every major social network I could think of and even started to gain a good gathering of other users all supporting each other’s small-ish businesses. But no matter how hard we pushed, we still haven’t seen any results from eBid. I have literally had 1 successful sale in 2 months, a HUGE drop from the 400 items I sold last year on eBay. I even tried my own website but thanks to the Pay-Per-Click scam from the latest generation of egg-heads, that has turned out to be one very expensive adventure.

    I ran a test promotion through Google to see if it would work, as these are supposedly “quality clicks” and 1 of the adverts for a £29.99 item received charged clicks at a cost of £37 and not one single sale. Not a one. Now I know the product sells alright in 2 places, perfectly in another and not worth while using anybody’s Pay-Per-Click as the competitors are artificially raising clicks, advanced crawling techniques are creating artificial “unique” clicks and who knows, maybe even Google themselves added some, not to mention Google’s competition. One thing is for sure, the clicks kept coming at a rate that went up to this cost in less than a day, if I made lower bids I wouldn’t have been shown at all, but somehow I’m certain I would have still received charged click on my ads somehow. But one thing is for sure, I will definitely pay eBay as soon as possible and open my account back up, because at the moment they are the kings of advertising and eBid doesn’t have a clue how to do anything, eCrater and pretty much every other marketplace is at the mercy of eBay and their users, which is why they don’t have anywhere near the same amount of various items than eBay do, because they think they’re acting responsible, when they’re really just falling for old tricks at the hands of the masters of manipulation and lies. And that’s why they’re winning, check out a popular item high price selling actual purchase from eBay then compare the results of listings and purchases made from any other marketplace, you’ll see a dramatic difference.

    Finally, one last point to make, I was bidding on one of eBid’s 1tb HDD when I noticed who was currently winning the listing and for how many “Buddy Points”, so I checked into their account details. They have had the account for just two months, already spent over 100 BPs on the last expensive looking eBid item, and only received one feedback which were from eBid themselves. I then checked their home page buddy point leaderboard. 4 days previous this bidder was shown at the top of the leaderboard with actual figures, 1 day later they disappeared from the board completely, then they reappeared but showing LESS BPs than what they actually have. When you click the current leade and see their profile, they’re showing to have 300 more than what has been showing on the board for the previous 2 days. Answer me this, how does a user gain so many buddy points in under two months, without a single sale? The only way they could have gotten those points would be either to create hundreds upon hundreds of fake accounts (which could account for the ever increasing non payers to get more points on their account) but how long would that really take and is it worth all the effort to get something for free that you can get for around £100? Weird huh?

    Then there’s another user, over a thousand 25p-£1 sales spanning over 5 years. Yet this person has bought 13 of the Branded items from eBid’s Free buddy listings ranging from 60-over 100 buddy points each, they also threw in a cheap T-Shirt right in the middle YET after spending over 1,000 Buddy Points, their account STILL has over 800 Buddy Points showing to have. Even weirder, right? on top of that this user still has open accounts on all other marketplaces but isn’t using them at all, not even to park listings and build the name, but on eBay in particular they’ve made it look like an unreliable site in their feedback and STILL the account isn’t suspended, still registered as a business and still able to list and make a lot more money than the 25p per DVD they’ve recently been getting, Does any of this sound anywhere near normal for a “businessman” who put the effort into opening so many accounts across the digital marketplaces that can be utilized for quicker and more profitable sales? If you don’t know how the buddy system works, check it out and you’ll completely understand what I’m talking about.

    Also, eBid don’t archive ANY of their own listings, I can see archived listings from many sellers dating back to 2011, any that have actually made successful sales that is, yet eBid completely removes the content, is this to stop us from seeing a pattern?

    So, early yesterday morning I sent a message to eBid through that listing asking for some answers on the validity of the users’ point amounts along with concerns over non paying bidders and not being refunded. I mentioned I’m concerned that either eBid are creating accounts themselves to make it look like things are selling when they’re not, or they’re supporting the non payers by allowing them to create multiple account to make it look like they have more users than they actually do and to gain extra profits from the lost sales. I also questioned their advertising techniques and what they plan on doing to make the site more popular, as well as my concern over the pattern of their more expensive free Buddy Point listings being artificially increased by specific accounts and in most cases always having more Buddy Points than they actually should, to the point where they outbid everyone. Are these offers actually real? Do they even have the items to begin with? You can actually see the difference from genuine bidders to the ridiculously over the top artificial bidders. I waited and late yesterday, not only did they not bother responding to me, they removed the comment completely and just carried on with their day. So I left a follow up question last night and I’m still waiting for a response or deletion.

    No, eBid aren’t extremely helpful at all, they are the complete opposite who are content with taking fees from fake bidders, and making claims that their Annual fee and fee structure make them the “cheapest around”. It is pretty much the only lines they promote constantly. Which should show you that they’re only interested in taking money from their sellers, regardless of how it’s done. They don’t advertise for us, they haven’t really grew much since they began as sales have always been terrible and now they are standing still. There is no strength to strength. With all of the extremely annoyed eBay users over the last few years, eBid were given the perfect opportunity to rise, and they just couldn’t be bothered. For 3 months, I have still paid them more than I have taken in the last two. Do I regret suspending my eBay account and trusting eBid, yes I do, and that will be rectified as soon as possible in the coming months.

    So basically what I’m saying is that although the most complaints about eBay is their pricing, the expense will make you near 8 times the amount back, whereas every other marketplace I’ve tried have consistently failed to achieve anywhere near the same results , with eBid being the absolute worst and most unsellable site I have ever had the misfortune of selling on. Yes all these sites can entice you with their “free listings” and only 3% FVFs and the we’re cheaper than eBay lines, but THAT is their only offer. You will never make a living off eBid, and you will find it next to impossible to start your own successful product website thanks to Pay-Per-Click-Scams, even Bonanza claim free listings, but the only real way to make sales through them is by offering at least 13% of the sale price, so they can promote you in eBay, if you offer less of a percentage you will only be found on Google PPC and even they admit that sales would decrease dramatically. How do they advertise for people? By working hard at promoting their sellers through eBay and at a higher rate than eBay charge, because you still have to pay your merchant account for processing payments. So instead of the 13.4-14.4% you would pay eBay in total, you would have to pay at least 16%+20p per listing just to get the adverts pushed and to accept payment. Why oh why complain about listing fees from one website, then pay another even more money to promote your stuff on the same sites to drive through less sales and profit than you would have made just listing direct on the main website you’re getting the sales from anyway? Cheaper does not always mean better, not by a long shot. If you have listings you don’t mind selling for £1 or under then eBid seems to be perfect. For anybody serious about starting and running a business and getting promoted, then avoid it at all costs! It takes months for the search results to be naturally formed in Google and there hasn’t been a single click from the Google AdWords they run from us that has had any “Quality” to them at all, well over 300 clicks in the two months, yet only one real sale and I don’t even know if that came from PPC, would that be eBid’s competition racking up the prices? Would it be eBid artificially inflating the viewed numbers to make it look like the items are more popular than they are? I’ll leave that up to you guys to think about. Take care guys and think hard before you waste time and effort in listing anywhere online. Don’t just look for the cheapest option unless it is your only option for what you sell, and even then it is just for part-time hobby sellers who don’t mind their £5 takings a month. 😉

12. I used to go on Ebid quite a bit a few years ago but it just seemed to have a lot of very junky poundshop type listings so I stopped bothering to visit.

    I get the impression from reading past comments on here posted on articles about Ebid that it would take you years to make back the membership fee as even with a huge inventory of decent items you will only make a few sales a year.

    Ebay has the visibility and it is where everyone goes because it is so well known. Ebid will never have the advertising budget to become that well known.