Thread: New home for "eBay refugees"!

So I know a lot of us that are eBay seller veterans are sick to death of how bad the site has gotten. Ever increasing fees, can't leave buyers negative feedback, PayPal scams....it seems eBay is staking all the rules and regulations against the seller in an attempt to push out those of us that MADE eBay successful in the first place by selling odds and ends. All they want now are mass retail sellers selling new, cheap Chinese junk in bulk. This is why many of the veterans have left eBay, and why when you do a search for anything specific, it doesn't yield even a fraction of the results it used to.

Well I was talking to some guys at the gym about this a few months back, and someone who overheard us told me he had been working on a competitor site for quite some time, and it was almost ready. A few weeks ago, he said he finally got it tweaked enough to be comfortable with going live, and he wanted to see what I thought since I had substantial experience with eBay. So I went over to his place last Monday to check it out, and I have to say I was quite impressed with the time and thought put into it. It's not perfect, but an excellent start that can easily be expanded upon.

For starters, it's WAY cheaper than selling on eBay. For example, instead of paying individual listing fees for each item, you buy listing packages at a flat rate per month, i.e. 5 item plan for $4.85, 20 item plan for $18.80, etc. Now some of you may be thinking eBay hardly charges anything for the insertion fee anymore. That's true, but what you have to keep in mind with these packages is it doesn't matter what the starting price is, and there are no additional fees for buy-it-now prices or reserves. Those prices are also for number of items you can list at a time, not per month! In other words, if you got the 20 item plan, you can have 20 items up at any given time. If 5 sell in a week, you can list 5 more items immediately. If another 2 sell at a fixed price, you can replace them immediately, etc. So this will bring the cost of selling per item down quite a bit if you can move product. And here's the real kicker. The final value fee is 2%!! That absolutely CRUSHES eBay. Not to mention eBay now takes the final value fee out of the total cost to the buyer, INCLUDING SHIPPING! Just found this out when I listed my Avatar 3D Blu-ray on there a couple days ago, as well as discovering their absurd new final value fees. I will be loosing $9.50 on my $99.99 listing. By comparison, if I sold it through this guy's site, even if I just bought the 1 item package for $1, it would cost me $3 total to sell the movie. Hell, even if I got the 5 item package, it would STILL be cheaper by a couple bucks.

Then you have the way selling is set up. You can do a timed auction for as many days as you like, just like eBay. You can also run LIVE auctions where you set a date and time for the auction to start, and people can view the listing till that time comes. Then when the auction goes live, the auction goes till there are no more bids (again, you can have a reserve). It literally has a little logo that says "going once"....."going twice"......"SOLD!" every few seconds unless interrupted with a bid. You can also set up "custom live auctions" which will allow you to setup a bunch of items to go on auction one after the other just like an auction house. As soon as the bidding on one item ends, the next item comes up. I thought that was a cool feature.

You can also haggle prices with the sellers (thus the site name [you quibble]) just like the "best offer" feature on eBay, except you can haggle via live chat! Granted this will only work while you're both at the computer at the same time, it's still a cool concept. I told him he really needs to create a cell phone app to utilize this, which he agreed was a good idea, and will be looking into with his programmer.

You can advertise services just like craigslist, though it costs a small fee vs. free. However, you can list days and hours that you're available for service, prices for the services, and once again, people can haggle with you. Perfect for guys that want to do side jobs on cars or detailing (which I had to suggest to him to create a category for ).

There are a couple options for payment. PayPal, of course, is one. The other is a 3rd party escrow where the payment is held in an account for the admin, and if no complaint is filed in x amount of days (I forget the exact number off the top of my head), the money is then put into the seller's bank account. This is a bit more time consuming, but nicer for security reasons because if a transaction goes bad, the money is in neither the buyer's nor seller's account, so nobody "has an edge". It's in the best interest of both parties to resolve the issue quickly because no one gets the money until both parties are satisfied.

The site also keeps records of everything. Every haggle, price offer, PM, dispute chat, etc. so if there's ever a problem, there's some tangible proof to resolve the issue. And I believe he said an actual person will act as an arbitrator in every dispute, and that those disputes will be handled via live chat so you're not waiting to go back and forth for a week or two on responses, or till a decision is made.

Some things I didn't like is that you can't edit descriptions with html, so you can't get very fancy with them. I'm also not sure if you can search completed listings, and as I said before, as nifty as the live chat/haggle feature is, it's not going to be of too much use till he creates a phone app for it. Still, this is a terrific start with plenty of room for growth. Biggest issue now is getting it exposure, so I told him I'd do my part to try to get it off the ground. I would like nothing more than to see eBay diminish greatly, and to have an affordable place to sell stuff again. But in order to do that, I told him he's going to have to not charge for at least the first few months. No one is going to pay to list stuff on a site with virtually zero traffic/no following at this time. So I talked him into creating a coupon code for 3 free months which he just e-mailed me.

And so, without further ado...

Site: Welcome to uQwibble.com
Coupon code (3 free months): UQWIBBLE03

I started signing up, then saw it required credit card info to do so... Then I quit.

Yeah, for signing up as a seller, it does require that. I have to talk to him about that, actually. Like if you have a coupon and don't need to pay for 3 months anyway, it shouldn't require credit card info.

I was going to sign up as a buyer/seller because I don't want to be limited if I want to sell later. I also don't want it associated directly with my bank account. I prefer to run it through a paypal account. Maybe that's something he can work on.

Well you can switch over to a seller any time. You just click on the "become a seller" link, and go through the same process of picking a package deal as you would right now. As to the PayPal thing, I'll bring that up to him. If you can pay for auctions through PayPal, I don't see why he couldn't link fees and such through PayPal.

I talked to him at the gym last night, and he said the reason the fees for the site have to be paid to him directly vs. PayPal is because the fees to collect directly would be a hell of a lot cheaper than taking PayPal for him. And since he's only charging 2% final value fee, he has to retain as much of it as possible, which I guess makes sense. I figured that was going to be the answer, but I thought I'd ask anyway. He also told me I can PM anyone his phone number if they'd feel more comfortable talking with the owner directly.