Personally I am very excited to see what will come of this. I have been with "Greedbay" for far too long now and paid them far too much of MY profits so much so that I have made practically nothing in 2008. I have moved on to other venues only to find that they specialize in "this" or "that" and my product ends up sitting on the shelf. eBay had it in the "Bag" for many years until they "Got too Big for their Briches" and decided that they wanted MORE. That was when everything began to fall apart at the seams and we have all just started walking (no...running) away. The fees (from listing to FVF) are so ridiculous that I will not sell there after my last 5 listings are ended. Please Jeff kick this new venture off and always keep your sellers best interest in mind and above all remember that without store fronts you will not have an Auctiva eCommerce. My 2 cents. Respectfully.... Terri
Originally posted by blukentucky: Quick Ques. Jeff
Auctions! Will Auctiva consider doing auctions, especially for the collectible antique dealers.
Now other sites such as goantiques, ecrater, etsy, provide a static hosting of items
But, the auctions trigger more sales in the collectibles arena
thanks blu
Auctions work well on a busy site - you need competition between buyers to drive prices up, otherwise most items sell for the starting price. Sure you could set a reserve, but from what I have seen on eBay etc this discourages bidders.
There are some Aussie sites that offer both auctions & fixed price listings but I wouldn't dare list a 99c auction on there for any valuable item as its far too likely 99c is all I would get...
I think that a low monthly fee of about $5 or maybe $10 for all sellers high or low volume, cheap or expensive price items would be very affordable. Along with that, a small fvf of 2 to 5% would also be very fair. Maybe some sort of scale that is kept affordable at all levels but does increase with volume of sales or something like that is also a good approach.
In any case, we just have to let Jeff do what he thinks is best and of course we each - individually - must evaluate if the price and set up as a whole is something that can work for our selling needs. Hoping and wishing for the best to Auctiva and all sellers.
Anything has to be better than eBay as long as the fees are reasonable and traffic is driven to the site. I for one am tired of eBay forcing me to discontinue paper payments and a host of other ridiculous rules that have nothing to do with being a good seller.
Jeff: Do you think you can give us a hint as to the fee structure for Auctiva Commerce? If your prices are right I'll close my eBay store in a New York minute!
I would expect the fees to be substantially better than eBay for the simple reason that there will not be the same traffic initially. I hope Jeff's concepts for bringing customers bear fruit rapidly.
After the last email was sent out to all members I was hoping there would be an announcement re fees, it would be great to know where we stand as I am in need of a store separate to eBay and would like to start on it very soon :-D
I am very interested in this new Auctiva initiative. E-Bay has a stranglehold on all of us and there's really not a lot of competition out there to rein them in. For those of us who are already familiar with Auctiva, there would probably be fewer growing pains than starting from scratch with a new service. Looking forward to seeing your price structure. It's got to be better than 12% + listing fees.
I am very interested in this store but also interested in the fees. Right now eBay and Paypal make more on each sale than I do. I'm a small seller....about $1000 give or take per month and eBay/Paypal gobbles up $200 of that and I get to keep maybe $90, so I'm looking for sites where I get to make a reasonable profit.
Posts: 9 | Location: Milford, DE | Registered: December 13, 2008
I can echo the same sentiment. eBay is brutal and I hear it from everyone I talk to. Your timing is perfect and there's no reason you can't make a fortune charging reasonable rates. Crunch the numbers from the seller's side! That's my suggestion. Make it attractive. Profitable for the seller. There's so many disgruntled eBay users you're following could be immense, immediately.
Well Jan.2009 is around the corner, I have a website I would like to drop,if Auctiva will pretty soon give us some cost.so I can decide which I would rather have. Merry Christmas to all````1 Johnny Blue
After reading the comments posted on this question I can see none of the members have every owned a brick and mortar business. If they had they would know that nothing is free in the business world. For those that have not owned a business before, you are going to pay: rent, telephone, advertising, lights, gas, trash, water, insurance, maintenance and taxes. Those items will be paid if you sell thousands of items or none in a month. When you sell none, and you run out of money you are out of business. Then if you add an employee you have just doubled your list of expenses. The only thing about employees is that if you need one you might as well go for the gusto and have a thousands. So, asking someone to cover your expenses in the beginning and when things get slow is not business prudent. Thou it would be great. Granted our parents did that for us when we were small, but as we grew up and went out on our own they stopped the handouts. At least if they wanted you to become an adult, they did.
My guess would be a charge for the amount of disk space a seller wanted to rent. Disks do wear out and when they do need they some form of a backup to restore the data lost, that is if you don’t want to start your business over again. So a fee that would cover that annually with monthly payments would be the best, for the seller. That way you only are paying for what you use. If you want to use 500 Tera bytes of storage for your items to sell fine but expect to pay more a month than a seller that uses 1 meg. A Safeway store pays more rent than a 7-11 does.
Another Business 101 lesson, business property does NOT rent out like an apartment or house. This is, in business if the building needs painting the owner paint’s it and sends the renter the bill for payment. If the plumbing stops working the owner fixes it and sends you the bill. If the roof needs repair, the owner fixes it and sends you the bill. When the property taxes are due, the owner sends you the bill. These are not spread out over the months the come when you can least afford them.
Another thing I’d like to see incorporated is the option that set a bidder count. If x bidders do not bid on an item the sell fails and the item is not sold unless the seller want to accept the bid. Single bidder auction or “Buy It Now” are not an auctions. Just like a multi player game, when you are the first member to join the game the game says “Game will start when another member joins”. I do not mind doing what a auctioneer does, start with a low price to get the bidding started. But, I also do not have employees in the crowd to bid up the item to get the price to where it should be either. So single bidder auctions should be out unless the seller wants them.
But we are not opening a 7-11,its a website. and I would not start a save way with out knowning the rent. its a question that has been asked by several. don't have a thing to do with Brick & Motar. JohnnyB
I'd like to know how much this will cost as well and if those fees will be an upfront cost or billed each month. Will it vary depending on how many things I list and how much they sell for like ebay does or will it be a flat cost per month.
Jeff: Do you think you can give us a hint as to the fee structure for Auctiva Commerce?
The fees will be on the http://auctivacommerce.com site this week. They were supposed to be there when we sent out the video email but we weren't able to get the site ready in time. I knew fees were important but wow.
I think almost everyone will be happy. Certainly some won't because it's not free or it charges a final value fee but I see these as being necessary parts of creating a long term successful site for both you and us.
I see this as a partnership between us and sellers and we both need to come out of it better. That means Auctiva needs to offer reasonable fees, great support, reliable service, improvements to the site, help bringing buyers, etc. That's not something a company can do if we were to charge too little. We're trying to strike a happy medium where we are both happy and both do well.
We don't have any immediate plans for auction functionality but it does seem to be a popular request and I do intend on listening to our users.
We're looking at a lot of different things for traffic. One example is that we used to run a nearly 2 million word ad campaign as an eBay affiliate. eBay banned affiliates from using Google about 18 months ago. What helps us here is the experience we gained managing a couple million keywords and automating the process.
Hi Jeff, i have a suggestion. You can charge fees according how many items people are listing on auctiva. For example, if they only list 1-10 stuffs, that could be free or very cheap, 11-30 items pay some and 31-60 pay more, that seems fear to every sealers. People can start their business very cheap and will not list many junk ads(I saw some free-listing websites, many junk ads from same sealer, I did not have time to read and search there). If people can do good business and feel like list more stuff they can upgrade their mumbership.
Hi Jeff, me again! I visited some online business websites recently. I think that the traffic and the things listed on it are all very important to a website. If people come here but there are only a few things listed, they will not have interesting visit again. So it is important to encourage as many sellers as possible list here at the beginning. I can understand you need many $$ to support the business but do not be rush to charge money. If you try to make a lot of money in the first few months i m afraid you will be disappointed. If you can be patient, you can make a lot of money in future!
Ebay was well known in China for some years, but it gaved up their business in China in 2008 cos an other website offered cheaper service there in about 2005-2006. That website burned many money for traffic and website at the begining with a little income. But it became stronger and stronger and after 2-3 years, many people already forget they can buy things on Ebay! Now the boss of that website is famous and rich! The name of that website is Taobao, I am sure you can read the stories online about it and Ebay.
Hope that can give you some idea. I like Auctiva and I hope it be successful! Good luck!
I have read all the postings on here with regards to fee's. In many ways I am disappointed with people already complaining that they feel like they are too high and haven't even seen them.
To the best of my knowledge this is not going to be an auction site, but instead storefronts for those that want them. A big question from me to the persons stating how they would like to see the fees be. Do you have any concept of the costs associated with setting something like this up?
Surely none of you can be thinking that the owner of Auctiva is running this whole show with a $450.00 Wal Mart special computer.
I guess none of you use any services to generate traffic to your FeeBay auctions and storefronts either. I pay less than $5.00 per month to drive traffic to my FeeBay store and they do a far better job than FeeBay does at getting traffic to my store. They do my meta tags for me and see that my site is crawled at least two times monthly.
Do any of you know that you get a substantial discount on FeeBay's fees by having people come to your FeeBay store through your website? Every item I sell goes out with my website addy on it, repeat buyers come through my Auctiva hosted site and then I get, and I am guessing around a 15% discount on my seller fees when they buy.
My greatest wish is that Auctiva will allow me to link my Auctiva store to my current mirror site for FeeBay. I own the domain and have already discussed any problems that I felt might arise with my attorney. He couldn't see any problems that FeeBay could have with its use. Its mine I own it, period.
I currently pay $67.00 per month for another hosted website that I have and get nothing and I mean nothing for the $67.00, with the exception of the hosting. In condiseration of the fact that I am "BLONDE" it also cost me $2000.00 to have the site set up so that the "BLONDE" part of me could work with it.
I guess my bottom line here is that Auctiva can and will charge what they need in order to make this viable. Those that can afford it will, those that can't won't. I for one will be very happy to step away from a site that offers auctions, in most cases they diminish the true value of the goods I sell.
To me this whole concept is a win win situation for any serious seller.
When do you think you'll be able to announce or give a general indication of the fees to those interested in this? Some post mentioned that the go live (but free at first) is targetted for later part of January.
I sell collectibles - mostly low cost (now that I've sold most of my more expensive items). And I'd like to be able to have hundreds or thousands listed and waiting for the right buyer without racking up lots of fees.
I certainly understand that there's a cost to maintaining a store so I expect some sort of (minimal) monthly fee to handle that. And then probably a percentage of sales fee so you can make money and have money to invest in the advertising.
I use the auction format on eBay for my trading cards. I can afford to do that because there are enough people who look for that specialty there. So even though I start things at .99, I pretty much get what they are worth (most of the time).
But this site wouldn't have enough people to justify that at first. And I'm looking at this to list my lower cost trading cards at a more reasonable rate with the idea of building up more customers.
So, my thoughts are that getting the site up and running, getting sellers here in the various collectible areas will bring buyers looking for those specialities. And then with enough buyers, you could look at launching an auction type as well. It would be fine with me to launch that later.
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