Selling Bead Jewelry on eBay

I am not an “old eBayer” who has used this online mega-mall for years, so I have nothing to say about its pioneering days. Right now, eBay is obviously the 600-pound gorilla of the online auction world, dwarfing all its competitors.

There are some good reasons for this. The sign-up process for new users is relatively easy, there are lots of online tutorials, and of course there is the advantage of sheer size (which eBay plays up in its recent rather odd “It” advertising campaign), both for buyers looking for items and for sellers trying to find potential customers.

Yet considering that eBay is the market leader and has been in business for a decade, there are strange shortcomings, too. The PayPal system has its glitches, sometimes photos do not display in auctions, there are days when everything slows down to a crawl, and I even received a Dutch error message once when trying to access an eBay function. Considering that eBay does not have to find the merchandise, take photos, write descriptions, package and ship the merchandise, but rather just provides the virtual infrastructure for the sales, there should be far fewer glitches by now. Recently, store owners could not even access their sales reports for several weeks!

Are there alternatives? Amazon Marketplace has a brisk sale in used books, but is not too strong in other areas. Overstock.com has started its own auctions, and Yahoo Auctions recently allowed people to sell for free. Yet when you look through these auctions, you notice that (at least in my area) they appear to be smaller and less active. A while ago, I scrolled through one thousand auctions for bead jewelry and found only a handful of items that had a bid, and not a single one with multiple bids.

If there could be a contender in the auction arena, it might be Google, and recently there were some stories about Google testing an online sales service. So far, there has been no confirmation of this, though, and eBay still remains the king of auction sites.