Does Ebay have any real competition?

[Anthony1]

I've seen Yahoo auctions, but they don't have much stuff on there, and there never seems to be any large lots of items on Yahoo auctions. Just individual items, typically overpriced.


I was wondering if there were any other big competitors to Ebay?

[jezt]

I dont think there is. Beleive me, I have looked

[Anexanhume]

Not direct competition, but not bad for gamers : http://www.gametz.com/

[Promophile]

Nope no competition, and there will be none unless the US Gov. steps in. Do you know why there is no competition? Whenever a competitior got too big, Ebay "baught them out" (besides yahoo auctions, since yahoo has alot of money).

[SoulBlazer]

I use Amazon to buy and sell most of my stuff. But it's not a auction site but marketplace, so I'm not sure you can call it DIRECT competion.

[SegaAges]

i usually buy from dp peeps, or get from blockbuster

[Vroomfunkel]

ebay bought out Yahoo auctions in the UK (and most of the rest of Europe, I think). Well, they just paid them a fat bunch of money to shut up shop and not come back again. Which was really irritating .. I liked Yahoo auctions. I bought and sold a lot of good stuff on there. Hmph!

There's also www.qxl.com and there was a place called yeehaaucions.com too, but it appears to have closed down, and the site just goes to ebay now :/

Vroomfunkel

[StartTheBiddingLow]

QXL is tiny in the UK and it has listing fees - that's a no-no.

I fly my flag on every post. :)
If anyone knows of a bigger site (for games) than ebid - I mean one that has no listing fee - let me know ASAP. :-P


WARNING: the following is not supposed to be an advert (I'll take it off if anyone is offended)

In case you care, www.ebid.co.uk has a £3 charge if you want to be a seller (no charge for buying) then it's free listings and relists as many times as you like.
International users welcome.

[8bitnes]

Amazon does have auctions too.

The amazon marketplace is in more of a direct competition with ebay's half.com.

[v1rich]

-

One big thing about Amazon.com and Half.com that limits their competition with Ebay is the fact that you can't list some items there unless they have the item info for it, example you will not find a listing for Peek a Boo Poker on either one of them, and a lot of other games besides that.

There is no real other Auction competition but there is selling competition. A dollar spent on a game from Amazon cannot also be spent on games on ebay, in other words every thing Amazon.com sells in games is taking away from ebay's games business.

[NESaholic]

There's a site called: http://www.tradera.com/
This is an auction site too, it's a european one, maybe this will help y'all out! enjoy!

[vintagegamecrazy]

Does anyone use www.bidville.com ?

[ianoid]

eBay seems to have bought ibazar, which has outposts in other countries.

You know, it's an utter shame, because eBay provides no community function whatsoever. Wouldn't it be nice if you could post commentary (with some form of priveledges that could be revoked if you are a total ass) on auctions, have communities based around different subjects and interact with folks more? It could be something optional that you turn on or off.

That's why I support auctions.digitpress.com or store.digitpress.com

I think that instead of the auction site starting the thing, it should be the thing (or DP community in this case) starting the auction/store site. I know it's beyond the scope of the web wranglers here, but it's just an idea. It could generate income for DP, and provide a way for respectable fools to get their games out among friends. And who knows, maybe Joe could retire early from selling the site to eBay in a few years? I'm sort of kidding, but I'm sort of not.

Of course, that initiates a bias that has always made the DP guides the best around- much less self interest than the rest.

Actually, I only wish that eBay would buy Yahoo Japan so that I could surf and bid there more easily- their video game subject headings suck and I don't know any Japanese to bid without the service charges from the bidding companies of $15 and more.

[postulio]

its interesting yes, but does it really matter? ebay is great. they charge around 2 bucks for listing, free buying, provid paypal for safe businessing and you can find everything you want

competition means more time to waste searching/buying/selling blah.

keep it all in one place i say.

[THXII38]

I use EbAY 95% but I do also use Q.X.L

it's a venur that kinda died off, but hung in there, it's very quiet, I use it to list
items that eBay in it's wisdom pulls for whatever reason :roll:

Obviously a SNES NTSC out - PAL in t.v signal convertor is a threat to eBay's repuation and should be reported :roll: :angry:

[evilmess]

http://auctions.overstock.com/ is new. :roll:

[Aussie2B]

While US Yahoo sucks, the Japan Yahoo auctions get A LOT of business. I'm pretty sure the Japanese use Yahoo more than eBay for auctions. There's stuff on there that you will probably NEVER see on eBay.

[Nz17]

Fast forwarding by sixteen years to 2020 A.D., how are the market realities now?

Who here is using eBid (https://www.ebid.com/)? I see it has many listings for video games, and even has a few listings for Dreamcast games, hardware, and imported Japanese Dreamcast games (for example). But like you might have guessed, the number of listings pales in comparison to the "king of North America," eBay. I want to buy from eBid, but there just aren't enough game listings. :-/

I believe bidders.co.jp was the Japanese branch of eBay, but it looks like it was sold to the Japanese company "au" and rebranded as "Wowma!" and now lacks auctions.

Amazon often treats sellers and buyers better than eBay, but at the same time the Amazon listings aren't auctions, the marketplace offers are usually more expensive than their eBay counterparts, and often times Amazon doesn't even have a listing for certain things.

How about Mercari (https://www.mercari.com/)? There are a lot of advertisements on television these days for Mercari. People can buy and sell there using the Mercari app or its Web site. Just like eBid, I'd like to use the site / service, but there just aren't enough listings for my niche (Dreamcast games, domestic and imported) nor enough listings for video games in general.

Both eBid and Mercari look good, seem to function well, and have lower fees for sellers than eBay, plus you can use (*Gasp!*) non-PayPal payment methods to pay for items. But eBay has the lion's share of listings and the mind-share of the public, so it is like fighting a wave of water with a sand trowel. Sure, they both have lots of listings of items, but not nearly enough to where they are the first place where people will go.

I wish that we had a duopoly for our hobby much like the duopoly of the Coca-Cola and Pepsi corporations concerning sodas where their market-share is more-or-less tied with each other. Sure, such a setup isn't as good as an oligarchy made up of several members, and neither is better than a more fair market, but both are better than the apparent monopoly that eBay has.

What to do?

[Aussie2B]

The bidding format in general seems to be on decline. eBay may still be the biggest of the auction websites, but even that seems to no longer be the sole place retro gamers turn to. With the majority of listings being fixed price these days, there's not much that differentiates eBay from the Amazon marketplace or anywhere else. I know a ton of retro games are sold on Facebook and probably other social media sites these days, but I'm kinda in the dark on how one would purposely seek that out. (As in, if somebody you're following happens to be selling stuff, that's one thing, but I don't know how one would find large numbers of strangers doing so, let alone feel assured that they won't get ripped off.)

[Greg2600]

I use Ebay still. Don't like/trust Mercari or Etsy. I sometimes use FB Marketplace for nearby stuff, but I get burned constantly on that, just one moron after the other.

[jb143]

I still occasionally use ebay for both buying and selling, but nowhere near as much as I used to. And it's almost always BIN for both.

My problem with FB marketplace is the search is busted. You put in a radius of say, 10 miles, and it mixes in results from all over the country. That would be an extremely cool feature if it worked right, but as it is, it's extremely frustrating to use.

[youruglyclone]

I use Ebay still. Don't like/trust Mercari or Etsy. I sometimes use FB Marketplace for nearby stuff, but I get burned constantly on that, just one moron after the other.

Mercari actually work on an escrow system. transaction occurs, they hold the funds and the funds get released when the item arrives. I had a purchase go sour and getting my money back was pretty straightforward.

[Aussie2B]

I can't speak for Etsy itself, but Etsy owns Reverb, which is like an eBay just for music gear, and my husband has always had great experiences with that, even when transactions don't go as planned. So if there are protections for buyers on Reverb, I would imagine and hope there would be on Etsy too.

[Tron 2.0]

I still use ebay not like i have much of a choice when buying for retro video games.I've used etsy once last year to buy a lot of 2600 games and it turned out fine.All ways thought about trying yahoo japan but that requires a proxy.Then there's amazon jpn,where you can buy directly now without a middleman but japan post isn't shipping to the u.s right currently it's just dhl.

[fluid_matrix]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wycPVQAR74

[Baloo]

Had a family member that used Mercari to sell a ton of stuff, but the setup looked quite sketchy to me, and didn't seem to have the same amount of protections as eBay for buyers or sellers. eBay is still my number one look-to place for rare stuff, then Craigslist. But I don't own any video games anymore, just the mini consoles, so I can't speak for video games specifically. It's interesting to look back and see how eBay has stayed consistently there over the years. I prefer it to Amazon which has become this tech giant.