If you want to sell something on eBay, sell it yourself. It would appear that after many programs over many years that eBay simply isn’t very good at arranging for someone to sell your items for you and they’ve just shut their latest attempt – eBay Valet, in the US.
eBay Valet was launched in 2014 with an iPhone app and expanded in June 2015 to include clothes and accessories. There was also considerable investment in eBay Valet with the acquisition of Twice adding to the eBay Valet technical leadership and engineering team.
Prior to eBay Valet, eBay assisted selling started with their Trading Assistant program which was shut down in the US in 2013. Then there was a Selling Assistant trial in the US in 2013 and eBay Neigbourhoods in the UK which ran from July 2016 to August 2017 when that too was closed. In 2016 eBay flirted with the UK’s most successful Trading Assistant, Stuff U Sell with yet another Assisted Selling program but this too was short lived.
You might think that this constant scrapping of assisted selling programs means that there’s either no demand or that eBay’s chosen partners can’t make money and don’t want to continue. Neither would appear to be the case however and when the trading assistant program was scrapped there was outrage from both buyers and sellers.
It’s also worth noting that Stuff U Sell which was founded in 2004 by David Brackin and his business partner Fraser Pearce, have been successfully trading for well over a decade. They’re one of Tamebay’s ‘Millionaire Club’ readers, turning over well in excess of £1 million a year. It would be impossible to run such a business with the size, scale and longevity without sustained demand.
While selling on eBay is (as their adverts tell us) as simple as snapping a photo on your smartphone, entering a title and selling, we all know that to get the best exposure and prices it’s way more complicated with Item Specifics, keywords, Product Identifiers and a raft of other hurdles to jump. A trading assistant not only makes selling easy but also keeps casual eBay users engaged with the platform and, if they make money on eBay, they’re then that much more likely to consider the marketplace next time they want to make a purchase.
