Re: Quick question for a new member.
We paid for the lifetime thingy pretty much straight away. We didn't do much reading about the site as we wanted to get our listings removed as quickely as possible from FeeBay before the new fvf increase came in, and that is coming on 5 years ago now, or about that anyway. At the time, the lifetime was £49.99 and we were paying more than that per month on FeeBay in monthly listing fees plus shop subscription.
At the end of the day, sales are sales, and we started off slow on here as with everything, when starting somewhere new, you have to rebuild your customer base as well as inform repeat buyers that you have moved.
You need to make sure you make use of the brand name and barcode facilities. If you are still trading elsewhere, and most other places now have far higher fees than eBid anyway, make sure your prices are lower on eBid to attract customers and there's no harm in increases your prices elsewhere as long as you remain cheaper here. Offer special offers as well like we do and this always attracts new customers for us as when our special offers are running we find people sign up here to buy from us and then come back.
As we are a proper shop, we have a lot of older stock as well as new stock, so we tend to keep the new stock on 7 day with 10 auto reposts, as well as having some items on a 30 day cycle. Much older stock, we leave on the run until sold but we might start putting some of the older stock on 30 day cycles with 10 reposts. We like how we are not limited with listing options here unlike FeeBay and other places charging set fees for specific mounts of days. Plus, 2% fvf is nothing really on most of our items compared to what other sites are charging, just ripping sellers off.
Why can FeeBay afford to advertise the way they do? It's simple, ripping sellers off with extortionate fvf's. And no doubt financial investment from shareholder if they are on the stock market now, never bothered ot check that out actually.
You do need to work a little harder here than places like FeeBay, but there is not much difference between our volume of sales per year between FeeBay and here as we have become established here now. It takes time, but worth it in the end as we're no longer paying a minimum of 80% of our profit to FeeBay. We don't touch Amazon as they are as bad as FeeBay and we just feel other sites lower down the chain are not as good as eBid. We can breathe here knowing we're not going to struggle to pay monthly fees in excess of £70 per month and when sales slow down like they do for us during the summer, we were out of pocket big time with FeeBay fees and nowhere near enough sales to even come close to breaking even during our quiet time of the year.
I doubt we have had an eBid invoice for over £25.00 yet in any given month since we have been here lol. We made back the lifetime thingy after about 10 months as it took a while to get things moving here but we didn't care because we no longer had excessive and unfair fees to pay so the money we were losing every month in FeeBay fees was instead going into buying additional stock.
Some people do really well here, others do great, others not so good. It all comes down to what you are willing to put into it. It also comes down to having something in stock at a fair price, hopefully cheaper than other auction sites, while at the same time, where you are selling, what is the availability of it elsewhere? How many competitors have you got? What are their prices? What are their shipping costs? We have a lot of competitors, especially on FeeBay, and the action figures we're selling for £8.99 here on eBid are normally around £15.00 per figure on FeeBay, so if collectors/parents want to be ripped off elsewhere instead of taking the time to shop around for a better deal, then that's their problem, not ours.
It can be difficult to beat people on postage costs especially when like us, we're buying bran new packaging materials from a manufacturer, but it is better than sending someone their item in a box that has previously contained something they might have a severe allargy too! We charge the actual cost of shipping including the cost of packaging materials. Some of our competitors on FeeBay are charging under £2.00 shipping for a single action figure while charging £15.00+ for the figure itself. Others are even offering free shipping but again, the cost of the figure is over £15.00 so the customer is not really saving any money at all by buying with our competitors especially when they're paying £30 for two figures that they could get from us far cheaper (and getting a 3rd figure for free when our special offer is running), but again, it comes down to the customer not shopping around for a better deal so they miss out.
FeeBay is well-known and established, eBid probably fairs better in the UK than the USA, but eBid still has a long way to go. Yes, eBid could advertise on TV, but that is expensive, then you add to that how many countries they would have to advertise in, it all adds up to costs that are beyond eBid's capabilities right now, unless they raise fvf's, which I think they are reluctant to do right now and in the future. but there are other avenues of advertising eBid could go down which is cheaper than advertising on TV and that is radio and just as many people listen to the radio as they watch TV.
A lot of sellers often make the mistake of listing stuff and relying on magic for customers to come here and buy. Not going to happen, this is not a Harry Potter movie. To be successful, you have to work at it, you have to put a lot more in to it than what you will get out of it in the beginning.
Anyways, just some thoughts to share and think about..
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Originally Posted by Maelbrigda
