When I'm not working as a software developer, I enjoy tennis, motor racing, listening to Manic Stree...
When I'm not working as a software developer, I enjoy tennis, motor racing, listening to Manic Street Preachers, drinking beer, nice food.
Member since:11.08.2000
Reviews:80
Members who trust:19
Recently I upgraded my PC and so I had some parts that were redundant. As my home is quite cluttered as it is I needed to get rid of the items quickly and after scouring the internet for ways of selling my items I came across www.ebay.co.uk. I have heard of ebay before and they are known internationally. Anything can be sold on the website and in fact, the last working Spitfire was auctioned on ebay!
The first thing you need to do is to register your details on ebay and this includes giving them your credit card details. For those who are sceptical about giving card details on the internet, I can assure you that I have never received any "phantom" transactions. The reason for registering your credit card is that there are various charges involved but more on that later.
Once
you are registered and logged in you are presented with options to browse, sell or buy. By choosing one of the options you must choose a category from cars, computers, electricals, etc. I have never bought anything on ebay so unfortunately I will not comment on the purchasing side. I have sold various items and have had a lot of success with my sale.
Selling an item involves filling in a large form and I found it tedious to say the least. As well as specifying detials of the items you wish to sell, you need to specify how you would like to accept payment, minimum bid price, reserve price, length of the auction, etc. Granted, you need to specify quite a lot of information but some of the fields on the form are unnecessary and are better placed in a menu. For example, there is an option on the form which allows you to place the auction under another category (eg. you may want to place PC Hard Disk under 2 categories) but most people will not want to do this and optional details should be moved over to a separate form or menu. The form as it is looks too cluttered.
After you have placed your advert there will be charges made. You will be charged a listing fee depending on the opening value of the item you atre selling. This breaks down as follow:-
Cars, lorries = £5.00 charge Real estate = £30.00 charge
There is an additional reserve price charge which is as follows:-
£0.01 - £14.99 = £0.30 charge £15.00 and up = £0.60 charge
The reserve price charge will be refunded if the item does sell at the end of the auction.
As you can see, there are quite a few fees to pay but there's more. You are charged for highlighting your advert, advertising in a special feature home page, displaying the advert in bold and loads more. There is one final charge at the end of the auction and these are as follows:-
5% of the amount of the high bid (at the auction close) up to £15.00 -Plus-
2.5% of that part of the high bid from £15.01 up to £600.00 -Plus-
1.25% of the remaining amount of current high bid that is greater than £600.00
For cars, the final fee is £15 fixed and for real estates there is no final value fee.
The final value fee will not be charged if you received no bids or if you received no bids that matched or bettered the reserve price.
I find the charges very complicated and sometimes quite expensive. There are other auction sites which are cheaper such as QXL. Yahoo and Loot are free! However, I stick to ebay. The reason is that they have much more users than any other so your items are more likely to sell. Another plus point is that you are given some form of protection if a bidder does not obey the rules (such as not honouring the contract by withdrawing his bid after winning the auction or not making any payment).
I have only once failed to sell an item on ebay and had to readvertise it but lower the reserve price. On all other occassions selling the goods was really quick and I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of people who wanted my old equipment - some people even emailed me to sell them the goods at a nominated price providing I cancel the auction!!
Their website is fairly easy to use despite the tedious filling of large forms. It is quite easy to view the items you are selling and to see what the highest bid is although there are a couple of steps too many to get to this. There is a comprehensive help system which will guide you through all the steps. Navigating is quick too and the website is quite reliable (although it is down on Friday's between 9am and 11 for maintenance).
On the whole I can recommend ebay. It is the most popular, despite the charges. I know there are others but I rather pay the charges in ebay as I will be protected from time wasters and unscrupulous people.
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Jan 17th, 2002
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