eBay Alternatives: eBid, OnlineAuction & Overstock Auctions

By Edward Tomchin
EcommerceBytes.com

There is a tremendous hunger for information
about online auction sites beyond the industry
giant eBay. Sellers want to know which is the
best venue in terms of being easy to use,
inexpensive, and most importantly, drive
shoppers to listings. But there is no one
clear winner that is best for all sellers or
categories of merchandise. What follows
is an evaluation of three auction sites written
from the perspective of an online seller.

eBID.net
eBid currently has around 2.0 million active
auctions across 9,080 categories in 18 different
nations including the U.S. and accepts PayPal,
pppay.com and Google Checkout for payment.

eBid's pages tend to be a bit cluttered and it
can be confusing and time-consuming finding a
feature, link or information until you're more
familiar with the site.

eBid offers a number of different accounts.
Just for signing up you get a Lifetime Buyer
Account where you can place bids, purchase
Buy Now items and list items you want. The
cheapest seller account is a free Single
Auction Seller Account that allows you to
buy and list one auction at a time with no
listing fees and allows you access to
PPPay.com for checkout for your buyers.
This account requires a credit card
authorization verification.

Standard Auctions have no listing fee, a
3% final value fee and severe feature
restrictions. Platinum Auctions have a
5-cent listing fee and 3% Final Value
fee but includes all the features eBid
offers including BuyNow Price, Fixed
Price, Run Until Sold, Video, Auto Extend,
Custom Start Date, Custom End Date,
Gallery Picture in Search Results,
Cross Promotions and Integrated Checkouts.
Many of these features can also be purchased
for a small fee in other types of auctions.

For auction descriptions, eBid offers a
simple and an advanced WYSIWYG editor.
HTML is allowed as well as hosting your
own photos.

Feedback can be left, replied to and
edited by both parties.

OnlineAuction.com (OLA)
OLA offers items for sale across a
plethora of categories.

OLA is not the easiest site to get around.
For instance, I could find nothing on
searching closed auctions until I queried
customer support twice. The first time I
got no response, and the second time
I got an immediate response and replies.

The closed item link was neatly tucked
in the left hand column as "What's Sold."

Unfortunately the sold listings do not
include the unsold auctions, so there is
no way to determine a sell-through rate
for them. Instead, I tried to determine
how much bidding activity there was on
active listings, keeping in mind it was
not an apples-to-apples comparison to STR.

Verified Sellers are charged $8 a month
and are entitled to bid without limitations,
communicate between Buyers & Sellers via a
private O-Mail account, use Chat Rooms,
and view/post feedback. Verified Sellers
are also allowed to list and sell unlimited
amount of items with no listing or final
value fees. Verified Sellers are security
checked through a monthly credit card
validation process.

OLA also offers a Charter Membership for
$96/year or a Founding Membership for $196
for the First Year and $96 per
year thereafter.

Off-site hosting of photos is possible but
you cannot use your own HTML code. You must
use OLA's rather bland auction format.

Overstock Auctions
The upside of Overstock Auctions is its
simplicity and ease-of-use for both buyers
and sellers.

Overstock Auctions offers more than 100
major categories and features such as
Subtitles, Make It Mine (similar to a
Buy It Now), and 10-day auctions are free.

Insertion fees range from 10 cents (for
opening prices of 99 cents or less) to
$3.15 (for opening prices of $500 and
above). Closing Fees are broken down
according to the selling price of a
successful auction. Items selling for
up to $25.00 have a 3% closing fee.
Items selling from $25.01 to $1,000 charge
3% of the initial $25.00 ($0.75), plus
2% of the remaining closing price balance
up to $1,000.00.

HTML descriptions are allowed in the auction
descriptions but there is a maximum limit
of 100,000 characters which I think works
to save buyers from page after page of some
overly cautious seller's endless disclaimers.
Only basic HTML is allowed.

Uploading photos is easy and Overstock
supports jpg, gif, png and bmp formats
up to a maximum of 10 Mb in size for
each photo which seems like a waste
of bandwidth.

Overstock.com Auctions' payment options
include Google Checkout, PayPal, credit
cards, personal checks, C.O.D. money
order or cashier's checks. Overstock
also allows buyers to pay via credit
card through O-Auctions Checkout,
designed to make closing and collecting
on an auction very simple and convenient
for both sellers and buyers.

The downside of Overstock Auctions is
that you are competing with Overstock.com,
which lists its own merchandise.

Overstock also offers one-day auctions
for sellers with hot items - the popular
kind not the stolen kind - and there are
a small number of forums for members to
discuss issues and receive updates
from Overstock.