Again: Alternatives to ebay

Bill · 2009-08-24T06:04:10+00:00

I've been wondering why the last two things I bought from ebay charged postage at below cost. Now I know.I went to advertise a decent external soundcard for a low start price auction, weighed it and worked out the postage cost, got to the final stage only to be told that for this item the maximum postage I could charge was £0.00. As postage was going to be about £3.00, I naturally went back and put the price up by a bit more than that.That will work for the next few days while they have their bizarre no listing fees offer, but after that it looks like the end of ebay for me for small value items.My son, who buys and sells better stuff than me, tells me that he is almost always now losing money on p & p, and so adjusts the price accordingly.I appreciate that people 'made a bit' on the postage, but only the terminally stupid would not add postage and auction price before bidding, and this now seems to mark the end of "99p" starting price give it a punt offers.No doubt they have brought in a bunch of business graduates to advise on their model.What is the most likely to succeed ebay as the most viable on line auction outfit? If I were younger, I'd be seriously thinking of starting one up.

Aug 24, 2009 62 Replies

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Mark 16 years ago

The moderator of my local group told me this. I don't know of any timescales.

I agree that the current system is very cumbersome.

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Mark 16 years ago

See this for details.

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Jules 16 years ago

Huzzah for pages full of capitalised, underlined text. If the people maintaining that site are the people responsible for implementing the new lists then I think Yahoo may actually be better! :-(

Did it really only start in 2003? Feels like I've been using Freecycle for donkeys' years now...

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