If this topic has been discussed in depth elsewhere, my apologies and please provide a link. My own search hasn't found such a topic.

In another part of these forums, a new site is displayed. A statement on the new site has the the owner saying he has shut down his former eBay store and opened one in CC because, " . . . with recent increases of fees, security fears and also changes in how shops are displayed on ebay . . . "

I've invited him to expound on that topic in this thread and hope he does. Specific details would be welcome.

In trying to sell a shopping cart based on a customized version of CC hosted on my server, I've been asked to explain why CC is better than an eBay or Yahoo store. Frankly, I don't know enough about eBay or Yahoo to answer the question.

So I'm putting it up for discussion here, looking for your knowledgeable input on the pros and cons of CC cart versus one from either eBay or Yahoo.

Anyone?

TIA

Hi,

It far cheaper to list products on your own website then ebay...

Actually the only things you have to pay for when you have your own website, is the hosting fees, domain fees and software fees (cubecart).

On ebay you have to paid to list a item, pay a fee when someone buy a item and to relist a item after 30 days.

If you do the maths, ebay shop cost alot more then your own shop..

Thats why i change...

That's a great response. Now let's take it to the next level. As a businessman, I can't make a decision that affects dollars, without dollar facts. I need to be able to tell a client hard numbers, not generalities.

That's a not criticism of your response. It is genuinely appreciated and respected.

But a client who can afford what I'm selling usually got there by making choices based on numbers.

Can you give us specifics?

Maybe a cost comparison analysis?

Thanks

Well for example if I sell 20 products each month for one year, all the same product to make it easier.....

20x Basic Keyboard that you sell for $39.99

eBay Shop

$14.95 per month (+ one free 30-day "trial"), so thats $164.45 per year....

So products:
20 products x $0.20 = $4 per month to list 20 products = $48 per year
20 x $39.99 = $799.80 - 10% (Final Value Fee) = thats $79.98 in fees for one month = $959.76 per year

So in fees you paid:
$14.95 per month (Subscription fee)
$79.98 per month (Final Value Fees)
$4 per month (to list 20 products)
-----------------------------------------
Total: $98.93 per month
$1172.21 per year (in fees)

Own Shop

Hosting $12 per month = $144 per year
Domain $15 per year
Cubecart (once off) $69.95
Cubecart support $9.95 per year
Modding & install $150 (once off)

Thats $388.90 for the first year, and $168.95 per year after that...

So its $1187.16 per year (on eBay) or $168.95 per year (own shop)....

Remember the ebay fees will go up when you start selling more items, but the own shop is a fixed price (after time you might need to upgrade to a new plan to get more space)....

I am a business man, I know it bad to have a shop down just to get the software running and the mods installed, but you at the differents in prices. Plus I have found customers trust a business website shop, then ebay since all the issues eBay was going thought in the press. But this only works if your website looks like a cubecart template.

Wow. You nailed it!

Thanks. That's exactly the kind of data needed.

Regards, Joe

No problems...

One thing not mentioned is the cost of promotion.
Ebay also gives good exposure (albeit you'll be listed with competition)
Also, Ebay is fairly non-technical to set-up and use.

Compare this to a shopping cart (CC, Zen, OSC, etc). Unless you are fairly "techy", it will be an uphill struggle to get a successful store without paying for outside help.

Don't get me wrong - I prefer the power to make my CC stores look and behave (mostly) how I want, but there are a few more costs to throw into the equations!

Interesting thread!

Jason

A similar cost analysis using Yahoo would be welcome.

Meanwhile, there is one serious drawback to eBay and Yahoo in comparison with. You are captive.

You may not download a copy of all your files and database, then upload them to a different hosting server. With your own CC-based shop, you may change hosts at any time, with a few clicks of a mouse. You literally are "Master of our Own Domain." (a wink to Seinfeld fans on that one.)

Further, while you may not care, Yahoo and eBay are accumulating and using your data, your metrics, your experience to enhance themselves. While they may claim or promise never to use your client list and sales data, it would not be the first time a big company violated that kind of a promise.

There's some non-financial differences to also consider:

1. Marketing:

- Ebay is used by millions, so your products come up immediately to those purchasing through it. Ebay also does very little in chasing up your customers, and reminding them to make a repeat purchase if they haven't ordered in a while.

Then again, so are search engines, but...

- CC stores need to rely on search engine indexing, so you'll need to give your store a little assistance in making sure it's going to come up in the top results list for the product your customers are looking for. You also need to look at ways of promoting your website through other sources. CC allows both potential and existing customers to administer themselves on a mailing list, letting you keep them up to date with promotions and new products.

2. Customer Demographics:

- Ebay is typically known as an auction site, dealing mainly with second hand good. Many shoppers on Ebay may not necessarily use it for general online purchases.
- Providing a professional looking CC store shows that your goods may be of a better quality than expected from Ebay.

My own experience of this a couple of years ago was that products I sold through the auctions did very well, however, similar products sold through my ebay shop (which I since gave up with) struggled to get sales. My belief of why this happened is based on 2 main points: The general use of Ebay, and the purchasing habbits of Ebay customers - They're always out to get a bargain because of the auction mentality.

My general observation is that cheap products sell well through Ebay (But the listing fees eat into the profit). Ebay customers are often suspiscious of media being sold through the site, because of the prevalence of knock-offs.

At the end of the day, my personal opinion is that having your own shop is much more work, but is far more rewarding, allowing you to build a brand image, and stronger relationship with your customers than you could ever achieve by selling through a third party.

Excellent post Brivtech!

I was wondering if the traffic flow provided by eBay would offset the "auction mentality" you mentioned and the need for marketing.

Hearing about your experiences and the fact that you moved away from eBay tells me that I'm better off with my own store instead of creating an eBay store.

Mention of ebay's security issues started me looking.

see: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,21008...VEMNL030607EOAD

If the article is accurate, eBay appears to be in desperate denial.

Well it seems i have started something with my comments on my site

Hello my name is Brian the owner of www.the-cd-zone.com from which jerseyjoe highlighted the comments i made about why decided to move away from ebay and open my own .com shop.

It seems their are plenty of views on CC vs ebay (I leave out yahoo as I not used their system) with bcwh hitting the nail with one reason I wanted to move, while Brivtech highlight one of the major draw backs of "doing it on your own" and then there is the hacking story which I add is very real and true (more on that later.)

My thoughts not as in depth as some of the posters here, yet here are own person reasons for leaving ebay.

I often now use eBay to find items that I can get for a lot less then the shops, and that statement highlights a problem for me and other sellers on eBay. EBay is or already has become a buyers market here in UK with more and more people waking up to the idea of stead of taking it down to local jumble sales or car boot sell it on eBay and the line of “you could get this much on eBay for it” becoming a common phase.

With everyone trying to under cut everyone else the price of new items soon drops sometimes in week or even in days once its spotted someone is making a killing everyone else jumps on the band wagon .

For me its impossible to sell a brand new album on eBay to break even or make a profit with the 1,000 already on their offer albums from just 99p when a typical new album to buy is about £10.00 give or take a couple of pounds. Of course your response would be then do something else, one rule which I have always stuck too.. sell something you either enjoy or know something about and music is one of my interests I enjoy, and even if I did change products unless I’m selling something that is unique to eBay the same thing will happen.

However I found a market in selling CD singles, more so the deleted singles no longer in production. Worthless to many so cheap to buy but gold to someone looking for that one song they may have heard on the radio station or TV, two examples taken from buyer’s feedback.

The downside of singles, they are slow moving items, thus needing longer expose in that the chance of the right person coming along and buying my single. With a normal auction the max length is 10 days, while running a eBay shop you can have up to 90 days for just 3p compared to 10p for a normal auction (this fee applies to CD’s) this doesn’t sound much but when starting selling more then one item these fees soon start adding up.

So a shop was ideal choice for me, which was until eBay decide to change the visibility of how shops are displayed. During the old days a search result would return first the normal auctions and then at the end would be shop results matching the search request. The new system that was brought in recent changed everything requesting in huge protects from sellers both in the USA and uk, now when a search is requested you still get back the results but if there are many results then any items that match that request in your shop ARE NOT displayed. EBay reason as I can understand was to move back to auctions due to fact so many people where dumping their items in shops instead of using auction format.

This you imagine hurt me badly but yet there was more to come, most of my singles where sold to overseas buyers more so the USA market thanks to my singles appearing on ebay.com website searches. But this too changed with auctions from the UK no longer appearing on ebay.com just recently, resulting in a seller having to pay two lots of fees, for items appear on both sites.

This wouldn’t hurt this was the killer blow for me, it simply wouldn’t be worth selling singles on eBay unless I was selling vast amounts, impossible for me when I have full time job.

Yes eBay just dropped the fees on selling albums, DVD but bumped up the final value fee up to 120% in some cases!!!!


As for the Vladuz story that jerseyjoe come across that is indeed very very real issue that is causing a sh** storm at ebay.com with whole threads about vladuz being deleted from eBay message boards by eBay. Last month EBay uk site a had a serious hack attack so much so it got in the national press and once again no comment came back from eBay related to vladuz hacker. Do a google search and you find A lot more if you interested.

I could go on. but I don’t want to bore you…I hope this gives you some more insight into why I’m leaving eBay.

Very interesting thread. To add my bit of experience...

I started out in 2001 with my own website (at the time, self-created) and selling items on ebay (and had an ebay store for a few months). Yes, I sold some things thru auctions, but the fees already mentioned eat a LOT into your profits. I now have 9 cubecart stores and ditched the ebay store a long time ago. I do maintain an "about me" page on ebay and a blog there so I can use it to promote occasional listings (which in turn promotes my stores), but consider ebay a marketing tool more than a sales tool. For the past several months, nothing I've listed has sold - even items that used to do very well - and browsing their listings, this seems to be a general problem with ebay at present.

I have no experience with yahoo stores - personally the ones I've seen come off as very unprofessional and cumbersome to use as a buyer, so I have no interest in using one for sales.

I have had success with Amazon however. I started selling a bunch of books (about 400 I had, mostly new) and did very well with them - in less than a year, I have only about 80 of the books left and wont mention the sometimes obscene profits I've made on them ).

Amazon Marketplace (I haven't tried their auctions - seems like almost no bids when I've browsed them) lets you "sell yours here" for most items Amazon itself sells (not jewelry, clothing, or shoes frustratingly enough at the moment) and only takes a fee when you sell something unlike Ebay where you pay a listing fee. And there is no monthly fee unless you want to pay their "pro shops" fee (which I recently started doing) which is $19.95 the first 2 months, then $39.95 I think taken from sales). Having the shop keeps your listings from expiring (otherwise they expire every 30 days and you have to relist them (a simple process really though time consuming) and also lowers the fee they take when an item is sold by like 99 cents (it adds up!). Having a pro shop account also lets you add items in most categories (again not those above) if they aren't already on Amazon, which is the main reason I am trying it. I sold 2 statues I had in inventory within 2 days of listing them! And for my regular price, not a discount like they probably would have sold on ebay!

Amazon is a place for me to sell off some extra inventory and allows me to do some marketing - every package I ship has a sales flyer in it about my cubecart store sites of course!

I have also tried listing a few items at ecrater.com - a free store site that doesnt take fees or anything, Primarily this is for promotion as their items list in shopzilla.com and other such sites for free. Naturally my ecrater stores mention my cubecart stores I have sold a few items from them (though admittedly have to add a lot more items one of these days to make it a valid test).

My main sales have always been from my cubecart stores however and probably always will be. But the more places customers can find you online, the better.

BTW, one thing not mentioned with store fees to take into account is your merchant account/paypal/payment processing fees which typically are 1-3% of your sales amount. Naturally this isn't just a cubecart fee, but does need to be considered where applicable.

I think that eventually this thread should be made sticky. There used to be a link on the CC web site that said something like, "Why Cube Cart?" I don't find it after a quick search but if it's still around somewhere, this thread should be linked to it.

While I'm here I want to mention why I have removed eBay from my bookmarks and never will buy anything from their site. Their policies allow that small percentage of merchants who act in bad faith to get away with scams. And eBay turns a blind eye to them because they generate fees and the victims do not.

Case in point: #1) I was trying to buy a high end laptop that had a list price of $2,400 and a street price in established retail stores of $2,000. I tracked eBay sales for a while until I determined it usually sold in auctions for roughly $1,800, plus shipping, a modest savings at the risk of not knowing your seller. The unit usually was offered at the rate of one a week. One day, a certain "power seller" put up 5 separate listings for the same unit, expiring sequentially over the course of 5 days, thus pretty much flooding the limited market during that time frame. I chose the listing I thought would sell for the fewest bids and put my self into the action at $1,200 with a hidden bid of $1,700.

There were 7 days left of the original 10 days. From there, the listing I was bidding on just laid there with zero bids. For five days my $1,200 bid was the highest. None of the other bids went above $1,600. At that point, he day before the first of the listings was to mature, all that seller's duplicate listings for the item simply disappeared from eBay. Obviously he was about to take a bath and had not protected himself with a reserve.

So he unilaterally canceled the listings with the notice, "no longer available." But what about the caveat that all bidders must honor that a bid is a contract? What kind of an open-cry auction allows a seller to put up an alleged open bid, no reserve, yet pull the item if it doesn't attract the bids the seller wants?

eBay's response to my complaint that my bid of $1,200 should have been honored? Silence.

The rating system has no provision for public exposure of that kind of behavior. So I went to a local bricks and mortar store in Manhattan, across the river from me, a long-established merchant who also has a huge online shop (custom built) and bought the from them for the usual street price.

Case in point #2 - I sold some un-needed Nikon camera bodies. A bidder won them at a reasonable price but instead of paying, he privately mailed me and wanted to renegotiate the price because he said that my published fee (prominently shown in the offer) for careful packing and shipping, was too high. I responded politely that those fees were consistent with similar fees of sellers of the same goods and were clearly posted in the offer.

He posted a nasty review that maliciously damaged my rating as an honest seller. And then he closed his account. Because he had closed his account (and probably reopened under a different name) I had no way of posting my side of the issue. Since I had only been a seller on a handful of occasions and had a rating from only one other buyer ( a glowing review, at that) my eBay rating was horrible. eBay refused to even look at the facts and remove his clearly malicious rating.

I didn't open this thread with the intention of it becoming, "let's beat up on eBay" but thanks for allowing me to vent.

The analysis of the Amazon system is interesting.

Anyone have a store on Yahoo?

Hi Joe

I am in the process of switching from Zen (Nightmare of coding hell if in Uk) to CC due to easy set up, I also have ebay store.

I would say a combination is the best approach. Ebay has massive traffic potential and if done right a real opportunity for valid encouragement to visit your own web site. Also if you are just starting off on your own site then testimonials are non-existent. But if you can bring a 100% positive eBay feedback, and/or powerseller icons/status, then immeadiately you will have some kudos, due to brand visibility of eBay.

On the down side, ebay fees and the need to maintain shop visibility now through BIN auctions is a financial burden. Also what many people may not know, until it hits their sales, is that eBay has recent slashed visibiluity of UK listings on ebay.com and vice-versa, hitting worldwide sales.

A shop, especially CC with appropriate mod (I will be using Estelles) can give far better calculation on shipping by weight, etc than ebay which is by item and difficult to achieve across product lines if different weights are involved.

It also makes sense to have a multi-pronged approach to your business. After all what would happen if eBay went down tomorrow, taking your shop, business, mailing list etc with it.

There are lots more cross overs, pros and cons for eBay v website, which I won't detail here, but I believe a comination of both with a long term goal to increase web sales is the way forward. This means having targets and a plan.

Stewart

www.warpaint.biz
http://stores.ebay.co.uk/War-Paint-Shop

I want to thank everyone who has posted to this thread.

As far as marketing visibility, it has been suggested by a former PayPal executive that eBay, not necessarily a store, would be a good place to sell my Gift Baskets. I've gone through the process of signing up for an account for the business, but have NOT yet listed anything. I need to do a little more research, and this thread says I should do a lot more information gathering BEFORE considering eBay as an alternative.

I knew about their recent price hikes, and additional PayPal fees, but had not heard about their security issues. For that reason alone, I may simply cancel my "business" account there. My personal account has only been used to purchase a few items, and I know better than to give away any account details to a phishing scheme.

When I went looking for a place to open an online store, a yahoo store was recommended over building my own site. Even with my considerable experience with IT systems and programming Yahoo was recommended due to the non-technical easy setup that was needed to get going, and they also handled setting up a merchant account that works on-line.

Time passed and when I asked a web marketing guy about setting up a storefront, the choices were ZenCart, osCommerce and CubeCart on his hosting site. With the research I've done, CubeCart won out as having a thriving community, and mods to address things that didn't work out of the box. I have no metrics for either Yahoo or CubeCart, but the more I learn, I think CubeCart is the better way to go, from low-cost (or even no-cost) to moderate cost, the monthly fees and cost per transaction.

A side note, as eBay is the largest auction site, they are likely the target of hackers and phishers, just as the PC is the target of virus writers. I use Apple Macintoshes for everything I do, and I think that CubeCart can handle everything I need in a low-cost storefront. I also looked at Amazon as a possible bookseller, and I think Mysty hit the nail on the head with diversification, and leading people back to your CC store will work much better than worrying if your information is going to be stolen by the big faceless company (eBay, Yahoo, etc.).

PS: I've been to one of eBay's physical buildings in San Jose, and there's noone to talk to. They do everything online, including HR and recruiting giving even more of the feeling of a big faceless company.

-Carl

I sell quit a few items on eBay every week, but like several people in this conversation have mentioned, the ebay fees really take a bite out of your profits. In my opinion, the best thing about selling on ebay is the vast amount of traffic that the site gets, and how I can divert some of that ebay traffic to my own website.

I like to look at ebay more as an advertising tool, rather than a place to make sales. Most of the people that buy something from me on ebay end up coming back for repeat buys later, but, most of the time those repeat buys are completed in my webstore, not ebay. You see, after they make a purchase from me on ebay, I send them an email letting them know about my website and more often than not, they end up coming back to my website for future purchases, not my ebay auctions.

I use to sell alot of stuff on Ebay also. Fees can add up quickly. My invoices where typically $100-200 a month during busy times. Lets not forget that if you don't sell your item you still pay the listing fee & have nothing to show for it.

I do however think Ebay has its place & can be a very useful marketing tool.