Many of us use eBay exclusively - with 10 million registered users and over 4 million items listed, eBay is the biggest online auction site. But what about the other auction sites? We decided to take a look to see how the other major online auction sites stack up.
In this issue, you'll find a chart comparing the fees of four sites - eBay, Yahoo Auctions, Amazon.com Auctions, and Gold's Auction. Elise James interviewed some auction users to see what their experiences have been with Yahoo. It seems everyone has his or her own favorite auction site!
We also searched for random items on 6 auction sites to see how many items each site carried at any one time. Our empirical conclusions? Well, no real surprise, eBay is number one in terms of number of listings, with Yahoo doing very well in second place. Yahoo, in fact, actually came up with more items than eBay in one popular category. Amazon is a distant third. This falls in line with numbers from Gomez Advisors, who estimated that eBay had over 3.5 million listings, Yahoo Auctions had 1.5 million listings, and Amazon Auctions had anywhere from 200,000-300,000 up to 700,000 listings.
For buyers, this means you should delve into more than one site - there are lots of items on all the online auction sites. You have nothing to lose, since buyers pay no fees, and if you find something you like on a site with fewer buyers, that could mean a lower price!
Sellers, on the other hand, need to go where the buyers are if they want to get the highest price for the item. Though Yahoo appears to offer fewer eyeballs than eBay, there are no fees! Yet if you could get a higher price on eBay than on Yahoo, it makes sense to pay the fees; there is no clear-cut answer here.
Like the people Elise interviewed, I'm sure you have your own opinion. I'd like to hear from you - what is your experience as a buyer and seller? How many online auction sites have you tried? Email me, or share your comments on the AuctionBytes.com General Message Board at http://www.auctionbytes.com/bin/messagebbs/view.pl.
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We are looking for people to write about collectibles. We have Collector's Corner Editors who contribute regular columns (Win - comics, Ray - toys, dolls games, John - stamps and pulp magazines, Marlene - advertising memorabilia, Michele - books, Wayne - sports). And of course our knowledgeable pottery contributors (Chiquita, Pam & Nancy). But there are a lot of categories of collectibles, and we'd love to include articles about more items.
If you have a love of collecting, consider writing for us. You do not have to be a professional writer, you just have to know about your area of collecting and be able to talk about what online auction users should know about buying and selling online. Share your love of collecting with AuctionBytes.com readers. Email me if you are interested.
Happy online auctioning!
-Ina Steiner, Editor
ina@auctionbytes.com
