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There are many venues where buyers and sellers can go to purchase and sell items respectively. Which is the best? Hmmm, probably neither for all situations, but we will give you a comparison of the various venues and let you decide which is best for you for the situation.
There are many venues where buyers and sellers
can go to purchase and sell items respectively. Which is the best? Hmmm,
probably neither for all situations, but we will give you a comparison of the
various venues and let you decide which is best for you for the situation.
We will compare eBay, craigslist, and various other venues (amazon.com, shopping.com,
shopzilla, etc). We will take a look at various areas of online shopping and
online selling from both the buyer's and seller's points of view.
The Venues eBay provides a marketplace for sellers to list millions of
different items and probably the widest audience worldwide. If you can't sell
it on eBay, it probably isn't worth selling. Go give the item(s) to somebody or
throw the item(s) in the trash. Amazon.com also provides a marketplace for
sellers to list items alongside the regular Amazon.com listing. The payments
for orders in these marketplaces are processed primarily by eBay/PayPal and
Amazon.com. eBay does allow different types of payments besides PayPal but they
scare buyers away from using anything other than PayPal. eBay/PayPal also
penalizes sellers, especially sellers with high dollar items, because everything
revolves around the dreaded "Confirmed Address."
Shopping.com, MySimon, Shopzilla, etc are all comparison shopping sites. These
sites let sellers list their items for a fee/bid. The actual ordering and order
processing actually happens on the seller's website. A few benefits for buyers
is that the items are usually cheaper on the seller's company website than they
are on eBay or Amazon. You also have the freedom of having the items shipped to
a different address than the address listed on your credit card, also called
Drop Shipping. This can be useful for buyers to send birthday or holiday season
presents. Drop Shipping is probably a minus or con for most sellers. However,
sellers are more willing to drop ship orders placed on their company website
than they are those placed on eBay like marketplaces with shipping address
restrictions.
craigslist is very popular for some reason. The site touts no fraud and no
scams but both claims are lies. However, craigslist avoids saying buyers or
sellers were scammed on their site because they don't actually process any
orders or payments. They really act as middlemen, the person who tells the
buyer that the seller is having a garage sale. They never touch any products or
money so they claim to never have any scam or fraud.
Buyer/Seller Protection
All the venues provide some level of some level of buyer and seller protection.
craigslist is the clear cut winner here since they never touch any products
or money. Next is the comparison shopping sites. The buyer can not be scammed
by the comparison shopping site directly. Sellers have to be careful because bots
love to click on seller's prducts and quickly exhaust the funds set aside to bid
on the keywords for those products. We burned up $600 in our test in 1 day with Shopping.com (ouch!)
due to bots with bad intensions. Shopzilla and Yahoo!'s program was a lot more honest so you have
to find the comparison shopping site that is right for you and your products. Next is Amazon and trailing way behind
in the protection/fraud area is eBay. Amazon can have the same types of fraud as
eBay, but the buyers and sellers on Amazon appear to be magnitudes more honest
than the participants on eBay. Amazon also removes the crazy Confirmed Address
eBay/PayPal require to get any type of protection for Sellers. eBay buyers
are not educated on the Confirmed Address and you see numerous feuds on eBay
between buyers and sellers about payments from Unconfirmed Addresses.
- craigslist
- Comparison Shopping
- Amazon
- eBay
Listing Fees and Final Value Fees (FVF)
There is a cost associated with sellers listing items for purchase.
craigslist again is the winner here as there are no listing fees or FVF.
The comparison shopping sites have sellers bid on keywords which can be cheap
or expensive depending upon the keyword(s). There is no comparison shopping
FVF so to speak since the payment will be processed on the seller's website.
However, the bidding can fluctuate depending on the time of day and
other seller's bids. Amazon has no listing
fees but the FVF depends on the category. Books and DVD FVF is low while the FVF
for electronics is astronomical. eBay bases its insertion fee on the initial
listing price of the item. The FVF is calculated from the final selling price
for the item. eBay also gets a cut on the ENTIRE sale because they really want
sellers to accept payments through PayPal.
- craigslist
- Amazon
- eBay
- Comparison Shopping
Ease of Use
craigslist won the previous areas so far. Well, it falls very short in this category.
The site is the ugliest popular site on the internet and is 99% unusable for a high
volume seller. craigslist barks if you try to automate listing items on the site.
craigslist items that don't sell the first few days might as well be deleted and relisted.
The daily scrolling format has to be the worse invention for selling since ... well, since
selling was invented! Captcha images, email verification, etc for EACH and EVERY item makes
this site a huge struggle for selling items.
For sellers, Amazon is by far the easiest to list. You find Amazon's product and click on their Sell Yours link.
eBay has a similar Sell One Like This feature as well as a Sell Your Item form. Numerous 3rd party, low
priced tools exist to sell your items on the many comparison shopping sites as well
as Amazon and eBay.
From a buyer's point of view, all sites will work just fine. All the sites offer good performance
and easy to read search results (craigslist is borderline). All sites, minus craigslist, require sellers to ship
the orders in a set amount of time. craigslist is just the middleman introducing the buyer to the seller so
the transaction is still completed and processed offline between the seller and buyer. This could take
1 day or 100 days depending on the details of the transaction.
- Amazon
- eBay
- Comparison Shopping
- craigslist
Overall
Based on our research, craigslist could have easily been the winner if their selling process was streamlined,
automated selling was approved, and/or batch selling of products was allowed. However, this hurdle pretty
much cripples any volume seller and reduces the site's usability to your neighbor who wants to sell
his used jungle gym. It is also regional which is a huge minus for our study. eBay does well but they
are so open to fraud it isn't even funny. When selling on eBay, make sure you are shipping high priced items
to Confirmed Addresses and following all of the eBay and PayPal rules to protect yourself. Comparison Shopping
loses because you never know exactly how much of your marketing campaign is legit with all the illegal bots
the sites allow to click on your products and use up your funds.
For buyers, all these venues are great. Be smart and happy buying!
The Winner Is..........
- Amazon
- eBay
- craigslist
- Comparison Shopping
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