AuctionCut

Dogpuss.com has recently reviewed Ebid.

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.

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Please share your experiences of Ebid with us...

It seems to have quite a lot of items listed, although mainly small things like DVDs, bits of jewelry etc. My main interest is somewhere to list property for auction. Ebay's fees are too high at £35 for a listing for real estate. There are a few houses listed on ebid. One thing I am not sure about is if your listing gets shown in all countries for each auction as the property auctions seemed to be the same for the UK and USA sites. Seems few bids though.

I will post an auction and see how it goes and report back.

I was hoping ebid would provide a good contender to rival ebay but seems I am probably wrong judging by experience so far.

Site is pretty confusing in some aspects and not all that easy to navigate round. To list an item you appear to need to upgrade to a seller account and pay by credit card or paypal. These amounts were fairly small and was happy to give it a go for a month, but could not find how to upgrade via paypal.

I posted in the help forum and received a response from other members telling me how to do this but a few people noted I had been given a strike for breaking the rules. This seemed very strange seeing as I was yet to do anything and had not even managed to place a live listing.

I tried to login to respond and upgrade by paypal and could not. There was no easy retrieve password page and you have to go through various help topics. So I trawlled these and read that my account had likely been terminated for trying to list a prohibited item and propery listings were not allowed. Yet there is a real estate category with currently 9 listings and the whole point in me listing was I checked through numerous ebay alternatives to see which had real estate categories and I could show case my properties for sale on. I have emailed support for an explanation. So far not at all impressed.

Well after several emails with support seems issue with my account is because I registered on the Uk site with family address but my location is down as France - because basically I live in France but speak only a little French and want to target selling to the UK. The only way they would re-instate my account was if they could call me at the address I registered with and confirm I was there - even though already explained I did not live there. Got nowhere with them.

They also failed to explain their policy on real estate listings as to why they have this category yet also list property as a prohibited item on the FAQ page.

Not an auction site I will be using.

Not a good start then for Ebid. There are so many users out there looking for an alternative auction site to eBay and with Ebid being one of the bigger competitor, it's a shame they haven't mastered the customer care side of things first.