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To: sharktrager; savedbygrace
uBid, for one. Yahoo auctions.

And Amazon, and a whole host of other sites. The problem is that eBay controls about 80% of the entire online auction market. If you go to Yahoo or Amazon or somewhere else, your chances of making a successful sale are much lower, and if you do get bids you're likely not to get as many, and thus not make as much money.

Actually, I think it's even worse than that. I have a bot monitoring Amazon's auctions site for a certain keyword, and I have, honestly, seen a *lot* of the same items continually advertised for over THREE YEARS without a single bid. And they're not bizarre obscurities; they're normal items that I know would sell during a single 4-6 day listing on eBay.

In short, if you want any real chance of selling your item and getting a decent profit on it, you have no real choice except eBay.

In any case, I think this policy is eventually going to come around and bite eBay on the ass. Wait until they get hit with a $50 million dollar suit for handing over someone's credit card numbers to a 16-year-old who forged a fax with his local PD's "letterhead" on it. (How long would that take to mock up, five minutes?)

28 posted on 02/21/2003 1:52:55 PM PST by Dont Mention the War
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To: Dont Mention the War
"In short, if you want any real chance of selling your item and getting a decent profit on it, you have no real choice except eBay."

I agree. Also, if you want to BUY anything, you have a much better chance of finding the wanted item on ebay. I've checked out some of the other auction sites, but they usually don't have anything of interest to me.

29 posted on 02/21/2003 3:12:10 PM PST by serinde
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To: Dont Mention the War
Thank you. That's what thought, but I was hopeful that the alternatives were effective. I'm sure a lot of stuff sells through those other channels, but much, much more through ebay.
30 posted on 02/21/2003 3:19:36 PM PST by savedbygrace
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