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?
