We’ve been trying, with some success, to establish an Ebay presence for some time. Our Ebay store, BuyMicStand, has had some limited sales success and I guess we will stick with it for awhile longer. The difficulty of posting. selling, communicating with customers, etc. is so harder on Ebay than running your own ecommerce site with a shopping cart that is difficult to understand Ebay’s success. We’ll probably eventually add items like mic stands and extension cords, but it is so difficult to do that I keep putting it off.
I guess that if you have only a single item to sell or you only sell occasionally, then an auction site makes some sense. But Ebay stores are entirely different. They almost always use the “Buy It Now” concept, so there is no real auction going on, and the fees that Ebay forces you to add in order to list your product are far beyond those that are necessary if you run your own shopping cart.
There is so much information pushed at a merchant who is trying to manage his online store, that you sometimes feel like you are going to go blind trying to find the link you need to manage one aspect of the store. The user interface is rarely updated and the result is that Ebay pages are so stuffed with images and text that it is impossible to focus on any one thing. This may be okay if you are shopping, but if you are a merchant, its different. You should be able to link to a page where primary merchant functions like adding an item or adjusting a price can be done without having to seek these functions out among others like “Eligible for Relist Fee Credit” and “Change my cross-promotion preferences“. These may be useful tools for power sellers but they shouldn’t be given equal status with user functions like “Sell My Item“.
Ebay has continued to maintain its dominance for online sales but they are ripe to be challenged by someone who does it better.
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