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Alternative to ebay


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Hi guys,

Ebay's new fee structure, despite all their hype about record low fees, really sticks it to those of us who sell a few expensive items a year. Have any of you had good experiences selling swords and/or pricey books on different sites that charge less than ebay?

Grey

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with new final value fees (no store regular auction like Grey has always sold things) if yoi sell an item for $555 (maybe the value of a low end sword) the old fees were $20.40 new fees $49.95 a 141% increase, for sales higher and lower the percenatge changes a bit but still a stiff increase.

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Certainly the e-bay fees are passed on to the buyer in one way or another and with the crazy new export problems for shipping from Japan, anything would be better. Those of us in the middle of nowhere can't even attend a decent show without travel costing at least 1000 and that would pay for a good chunk of the cost of some blades.

 

There must be some way perhaps that someone could create a Nihonto site that could let people access collectibles and sellers keep more of their profit. That said the "for sale section" here works pretty well but certainly doesn't reach as many buyers as sleeze-bay. All the known dealers have good sites but none really allow bidding.

 

Wonder how publishing opening bids in the for sale section and taking offers till a week passes or something - I don't know but it seems ANY collectible is hard to get when you happen to be looking and hard to sell when you are doing that!

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...the large number of people with more money than knowledge that ebay gives me.

:glee: :rotfl:

How very true. That is exactly why selling on eBay is so good. Here, you get a fair price for what you have. But on eBay, low end and junk fetches high prices. All due to the above reason. Can't argue that, and that is why a lot of us sell on eBay. Hard to replace that, and they know it.

 

Brian

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Dear Brian,

You make a most valued point, .... It would be indeed nice to see our members offer their goods here before using the eBay facility. Grey also is quite correct when he points to the GREED that eBay exhibits. In fact in the future I would not be surprised to see Webster's Dictionary giving " ebay " as a synonom for " greed ". Why is it whenever someone comes up with a winner like eBay was, ... within a few months or at the most a few years, .... it becomes so corrupted that it is barely recognizable. It reminds me of my father ( RIP ), ... if something was working well, ... he could not resist fixing it until it was completely screwed ! eBay has this problem with selling weapons ( antique or otherwise ), ... but absolutely no problem selling " skin movies ". Mind you, ... I haven't checked out their skin movies since I turned 60, ... a couple of years past now ! ....... I better have a look, as there sure as hell aren't any decent Nihonto there !

... Ron Watson

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There was a free auction site opened by an admin over on Don Foggs' Bladesmiths forum. I helped with testing.

It was primarily for knives and smiths tools but didn't seem to take off due to low volume of viewers.

 

Perhaps a collaboration between forums to get more people interested would be beneficial to us all, however, ebay has such a high flow of viewers that competing with them is going to be hard.

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I think the point of the original post was finding an alternative to Ebay because of the costs associated with using it. There aren't many choices to get the maximum audience desired when trying to sell something. You either don't care about maximizing profits, then you can sell the item anywhere. And If you do care about maximizing profits, then you need a big audience.

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Hi All,

 

In the UK we have an alternative auction site. You can list almost anything in the weapons catagory. There is no listing fee's and its a flat 3% commission if the item sells. I have bought off it a couple of times but never had any luck selling the couple of items I have listed. Alas as we all know to our cost that EvilBay has the lions share of auction goods. Here is a link to the site. Go into the "Militaria" catagory.

 

http://www.specialistauctions.com/

 

Cheers,

 

Brian.

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There must be some way perhaps that someone could create a Nihonto site that could let people access collectibles and sellers keep more of their profit.

 

They did - it's called nihontoden.com. No one wants to use it, even though it is now free.

 

All the known dealers have good sites but none really allow bidding.

 

I considered doing some time ago and looked at the software to do it. However, Henry announced that he was starting nihontoden.com, so I thought that I'd wait and see how it did. After all, it would require me investing money in the project that could be used elsewhere. To judge from Henry's experience, there is obviously no demand for an auction site for nihonto other than Ebay.

 

Kevin

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