My Ebid Showcase

Ebid is an online auction site that started up in December 1998 and has been going strong ever since. They currently operate in 18 countries and will eventually expand to most countries.

There is Seller and Seller Plus+. I have Seller Plus+ so that I don't have to pay for listing or closing/final value fees. Plus I can open up to 5 stores for free with Seller Plus+. I only have one store. I don't think I will have 5 stores. Even if you do decide to pay for listing fees or closing fees, it's far cheaper than feepay [a.k.a. the dark side as I have seen some people call them that]. Plus you don't receive constant annoying email "reminders" to pay your fees like feepay does. You receive one email at the beginning of the month if you owe any fees to Ebid. Also your account at Ebid won't be closed if you don't "pay right away" or pay on time.

The only time your account at Ebid gets put on hold is if the Ebid system spots any fake addresses or names you may have put on your Ebid account at the time you signed up. Or if a buyer complains about not receiving an item from the seller or if the seller complains about being scammed on a payment. All it takes is just ONE of these complaints to get your account put on hold. Feepay got rid of "buyer strike", making fraud more rampant. Scammers don't last long on Ebid. Don't bother trying if you're a scammer. You won't last on Ebid.

Some people don't know this, but when you list your items on Ebid, they automatically get listed in Google Base. It can take up to 4 days before you start seeing your Ebid items show up in Google Base.

If you ever had tried submitting your items to Google Base yourself, you know what a real pain in the ass it is, in even trying to do so. I gave up trying to list items myself in Google Base. I kept getting stupid errors about how I formatted the feed wrong when I didn't. The problem is the stupid script Google uses to scan your feeds with before they allow your items to be listed in their base. Don't bother trying to ask for help in Google's customer service department about Google Base. Because their customer service is on the rude side and they don't fully answer any questions you ask. They even ignore you and pretend that that they never received your question/complaint. Their customer service department is nonexistent sometimes.

If you want your items in Google Base, putting your items up on Ebid is the way to go. Painless and free.

Now here's a tip on how to keep your item listings fresh in Google Base. When you list an item on Ebid, don't set your listing to "run until sold". Set your listing to 30 days and set to relist your item 10 times [Once a month with 10 months max before having to relist all of your items by hand [or by bulk upload] again on Ebid].

Any item in Google Base that is over 30 days old is considered stale and gets put behind all the other listings in Google Base. I can testify to this fact because when I first started out on Ebid, I had all of my listings set to "run until sold". I started seeing after nearly 5 weeks of having my listings set at "run until sold", that traffic from Google Base to my listings ceased.

When I had changed all my listings to "30 days" and relist item 10 times, I received traffic again. Every 30 days, my items get relisted on Ebid by itself and the listings appear to be "new" [listings get pulled back to the top again] in Google Base. A nice way of keeping ahead of your competition in Google Base with little effort.

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Ebid has a forum board where you can ask the administration questions, chat with other Ebid sellers and shamelessly promote your items. It's not cluttered like feepay with groups and blogs. The only reason why people bother with having a blog on feepay is because of feepay's page rank. Otherwise most people would not even bother with feepay anymore with all the horrible changes in policies, high fees and not to mention the thing that is mostly driving sellers away: feedback.

On Ebid, you [as a buyer or a seller. It's not a one way street like it is on feepay] have the option of leaving positive, neutral or negative feedback. Neutrals don't get turned into negative like feepay. You can also change your feedback at a later date if you need to, unlike feepay. This is a good thing, especially if you left good feedback for a buyer too soon and find out that the payment you received was fake or a scam.

Some sellers are reluctant to use Ebid because there is no "import feepay feedback". There are two things you can do. You can either link back to your feepay profile in your Ebid listings. Or you can do what I do. I use Repatoo. Here is mine in action:

Reputation is portable. Repatoo is a service where all of your feedback at auction/merchant sites are displayed on one page for convenience for buyers and sellers to do business with you in a trusted environment.

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When you make any change to any of your listings on Ebid, your listing gets put back on the top in the category your listing is in and put back on the front page of Ebid. As if the item is newly listed when it's not. Same thing when you set to relist your item. When it comes time for Ebid to automatically relist your item for you, it gets put back on the top and put back on the front page.

The "notice from seller" feature is nice. The notice gets placed on the top of your listings. While the intention of using it is to notify potential lookers that you're on vacation, the notice can be utilized in other ways. I would use it to announce what kind of sales you're running on your items and what kind of items you're selling. This is a way of getting people interested in browsing what you're selling.

There are no stupid feepay boxes required to ship your items in. You can ship your items any way you want. Ebid does have it set easy for you where you can use either Paypal or Google Checkout to receive payment for your items. You are allowed to use/recieve other payment methods including checks and money orders.

I would not advise anyone accept checks or money orders because too many games and garbage can be pulled with them.

You can bulk upload on Ebid. You bulk upload by using excel [or open office from what I've heard]. Ebid has an example excel file [with directions. The directions are in the file] for you to use. It's easy and once you get the hang of how to do your listings in excel, you can write up hundreds of listings. It saves you time and energy in trying to list one item at a time on Ebid. Especially if you get cut off the net at random from your dsl box while trying to list something.

Most other auctions sites [including feepay] have a stupid windows program that you have to download and use if you want to bulk list. You also risk getting viruses and damaging your system that way.

There are other auction sites out there, but I like Ebid the best. Ebid has a high page rank. There is no harm in trying other auction sites, as I have heard success stories with others. The problem is not where you should list your stuff at. The problem is the buyers. The right buyer has to come along in order for your items to be sold. You can't force people to buy your stuff. Someone once told me that selling is like screwing and fishing. It's not how DEEP you fish, but how you WIGGLE your worm.