Ebid.net worldwide auctions
While eBay continues to dominate the world of online auctions, developing an alterative to rival eBay will never be easy. Over the years the likes of Yahoo auctions, Amazon and QXL have tried, but most have failed to make a dent in eBays market share. One such site which is making an impact with it’s members, was surprising established ten years ago and is still growing at a substantial rate.
With eighteen different worldwide editions Ebid.net offers local auction sites to the United Kingdom, United States, France and Ireland amongst others. All ran from the same domain, using sub domains such as nl.ebid.net for the Netherlands and fr.ebid.net for France this makes navigating the different versions very simple and hassle free.
The site still has a way to go rival eBay, personally I feel the presentation of the site somehow takes away distraction from the auction listings and although a support system is in place any queries must be posted in a public forum before you can submit them to the support team. Obviously this is designed as a measure to prevent customer care answering the same questions repeatedly and although this route may give a faster response to the member, I found it quite annoying this method was mandatory. I’d also love to read about how the site started, considering it is ten years old but I failed to find any information about the sites history and how it grew into a success.
On the positive side, registration is quick and easy – it took me less than one minute to register as a member and like eBay there is a huge range of categories to list your auctions in. Over 1,800,000 live auctions are listed on Ebid at the time of this review, with just over 4000 Ebid stores offered by sellers.
The fee structure varies enormously from eBay and this is what has helped Ebid succeed and grow. With no listing fee and no final value fee for the seller+ account, members just pay a single subscription for either 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, 1 year or a lifetime subscription. Currently the lifetime subscription offers the best value as a one fee of just £49.99 but members may want to try the 7 day subscription first to see what success they have selling on Ebid.
Overall, for an alterative marketplace to eBay I was impressed at the sheer size of the site and I’m sure it will continue to grow and offer it’s members great value. Ebid.net supports many payment options including eBays own Paypal so there’s really no reason not to try it as an alterative venue or in addition to your eBay listings. As always, your feedback on Ebid.net is welcome – click here to visit Ebid.net
