Takin’ it to the streets…
Thursday 24th July, 2008 - £8,778.07 in debt…
Ebay is the bane of my flipping life at the moment.
If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know that I started off by sticking some old stuff on Ebay and paying off my smallest debt in a week. That was great - everyone paid up and life was good. But then I carried on, blindly and recklessly Ebaying thing after thing, and now I’ve got four (FOUR!) unpaid item disputes on my hands.
FOUR! That’s enough to make me slightly cheesed off.
I’ve got a feeling this might be something to do with Ebay’s new feedback rules, so I’ve been on the hunt for some Ebay alternatives to try out. So far, I’ve found the following:
PlayTrade: You can sell CD albums, books, DVDs, games, consoles and audiobooks on Play.com, and the site’s offering ten free listings per member until the end of July. It’s not an auction site - you pick a selling price and wait for someone to buy.
Amazon Marketplace: You can sell practically anything here, on the same basis as PlayTrade - the item just appears on Amazon with your price against it, and you get access to Amazon’s millions of customers.
Ebid: An international auction site, this is one of Ebay’s main competitors. Luckily for sellers, it doesn’t charge listing fees or final value fees, but not so luckily it doesn’t have anywhere near the traffic of Ebay. But, if you upgrade to a Seller+ Lifetime account (half price at £49.99 at the moment), you’ll get a… wait for it… FREE t-shirt!
Ibootsale: This one is run like a car boot sale, where you buy a “pitch” and lay out your items to sell. Ninety-day, 25-item pitches are free right now. It’s not an auction site - the pitch system means that your item will be viewable for 90 days or until someone buys it. In theory, you only pay for your pitch and there are no other fees, but the site doesn’t currently say what the normal pitch price is.
121bid.com: Another auction site, apparently 100% free to use. That’s no listing, reserve, buy-it-now or final value fees at all. God knows how they stay afloat, but the site does carry advertising and use PayPal.
Gumtree: A great big online Classifieds section, where you can sell or swap.
And then there are the traditional ways of selling your old junk: Classifieds in the local papers or FreeAds, and car boot sales.
Any other ideas? Should I steer clear of any of the sites above, or should I just go for it? Are the buyers on these sites any more likely to pay up than my Ebay shysters?
Fernando Alonso Virus Detected
Hi Olivia, personally I’ve never sold online, but I have bought stuff from sellers on Amazon market place. If I was going to start selling online, thats probably where I’d try first.
Grrr at the pay disputes though, thats a huge bummer. Hope you get them sorted soon.
Gilly
Hello,
I don’t think it’s possible to get the pay disputes sorted out! As far as I can tell, you just tell eBay that someone hasn’t paid up, and they go “oh really? That’s not on, is it?” and then forget about it.
All of them are registered as unpaid, I’ve sent polite but stern emails, and got nothing back. I could re-list the items but it might end up being another huge waste of time.
It’s the final straw, I tells ya.
If the winning LOSER doesn’t pay up, and there has been quite a few bidders on your item, offer the other bidders a “second chance offer” - then you’ll probably get all the bidders, except the LOSER who didn’t pay up, bidding again. You can sell the item to them instead.
Just message all the other bidders and say that the LOSER didn’t cough up the cash so you’ve been forced to second chance offer it. It worked for me, I made £50 selling crappy old clothes
[…] four of them refusing to pay up. Hopefully I’ll be able to re-sell the stuff or settle on a good eBay alternative but, until then, I’ll wear a constant look of vague […]