May 14, 2007
Wow….where have I been? Didn’t even notice this until today. Not surprising though with how dead that place has always been. When I used to sell a lot on Ebay, I used to have an account with Yahoo as well to try and make a few extra bucks. I did make sales there, but it was really a dead zone for me in what I was trying to sell. Certainly wasn’t getting the same prices as I was when I used Ebay.
Even then there wasn’t much choice in where to sell in auctions to get a large audience. Ebay owns around 95% of the online auction market according to the articles I have read and it doesn’t appear they are losing it anytime soon. As a seller, I just can’t use it anymore. Ebay is using its monopolistic power to gouge sellers out of every penny they make on there. The fees pile up like they do on a phone bill and the amount of uninformed sellers just make it so you can’t keep very good profit margins. They either do not understand the fee structure, or are very charitable in what they sell. By the time they figure out they are losing their asses they are gone and 5 more dummies take their place to sell the same things you do. I just couldn’t deal with the constant search for new products. I never got myself a niche, but even if I did many others would find my products and undercut me due to their inability to do simple addition. Buyers are overprotected there in my opinion, while sellers get fleeced constantly by fake buyers.
Other than buying concert tickets on there now, I don’t use it for much. The prices aren’t even close to what they once were and the deals just aren’t there. Yahoo! closing their doors has no impact on this business really, but I guess I was surprised.
Has anyone tried the Ebay Auction Ads? I had them up for about a week, but wasn’t impressed at all. Every time I went to a site that I had them on they forced me to hit a pop up to run some script or whatever. I still get e-mails from them from time to time and they are about as unorganized as you can get. Recently they sent me one that said they had lost several days of click and sign up activity and there was nothing they could do about it. Could you imagine if Adsense sent you an e-mail and said they lost a week’s worth of your clicks? I’ve paid attention to Auction Ads to see if it was viable, but every e-mail I get is some screw up by them that deals with the publishers’ pay. Not exactly a ringing endorsement if you asked me. The do let you advertise porn auctions though. I guess that is something.
Filed under Computers and Internet