Selling on ioffer.com vs Ebay

[Houston Investor]

While standing in line at the PO to ship some items I overhead a conversation

about ioffer.com

 

I checked it out comparing costs, ect. It costs me $65 / month fixed overhead for my ebay store and 8.1% variable overhead. I found many things attractive about the site but wonder if there is really any decent amount of traffic coming there to justify the effort. There are no listing fees, picture fees, fixed store fees at ifoffer.com which makes it very attractive. In addition I noticed sellers seemed to be able to take checks, money order, paypal. etc.

 

I wonder if any of you have tried this site (selling) and how it has worked out for you. My interest in ioffer is cost reduction and more freedom in how I run my business. I also wonder if the site Ian Russel (formerly Teletrade) is planning would be another venue to consider. My interest in this is from a sellers point of view.

[James_OldeTowne]

I have not personally used it, but I have a friend who has, and he says he makes excellent profit. However, he did say it is slow.

[Houston Investor]

Yes James I bet it is slow there as I don't think it has quite the traffic ebay does. But prob not the competetion someone on the Bay has so a better shot to make a good margin. I loved ebay in the its early days circa 1998 as I was making money hand over fist. Almost anything with a pic would sell and then the big boys got in there flipping stuff that probably walked in their shop at 50-60% of bid and things got tougher.

[Coindude]

Tried to sign up there and having great difficulty!

[bsshog40]

I just registered with no problems.

[Dcoin]

The problem with sites like ioffer is that because there is no listing fees you get a lot of garbage to wade through just to look at one legit listing.

[ant]

catch 22

[bsshog40]

Yea, I glanced thru and man the Replica listings are outrageous. A lot of the Morgans I was looking at look like they're being sold from sellers who couldn't BS thier way thru Ebay and are trying another venue to get rid of . JMO

[123cents]

I hate to say it but free sites usually bring nothing but junk. Yahoo, years ago had a nice auction site till they went to free listings and then the site went straight downhill.

[Houston Investor]

All sites have garbage I simply develop a custom search to find what I want.

 

I find ioffer.coms free listing feature a great plus. This can be great for coins less than $50. They even allow a quick import of all your ebay auctions and I wonder if this leaves your ebay stuff intact on the bay, hence listing on both sites. I have many coins less than $25 - $50 I don't list on the Bay because of fixed overhead costs, competetion, time consuming scanning, etc.

 

Setting up at shows is expensive and takes your whole weekend. A local show where you pay a $200 fee is only worth it if you can do at least $2000 in combined purchase (below bid) and sale activity (10% overhead allocation to COS, Inventory) with public coming in the door. Of course a bigger volume drives this percentage down. If travel costs, etc. drive your show overhead to say $1,000 then you better be coming in there loaded to be sure its a good buying show if sales are slow. I try to have liquid cash funds available equal to 10-50% of inventory so if the right deal appears, then I am in position to acquire it. I have had shows where the gross margin on show sales was less than the costs of the show (a disaster) but the items purchased at a very favorable price more than offset the loss.

[ant]

even ebay in the begining had very few people. just about everything that has an opening day has a slow start. if you sell on a site maybe you yourself should advertise the listings by email,phone,forums.....seems like alot of folks just wanting everything handed to them...."we want full million people site right off the bat".

 

even children can have a garage sale with customers. why? cause they put up signs. these sites cant do all the work for you and keep it cheap. if a site is slow you the seller need to help yourself by advertising your goods.

 

we are keeping ebay going the way it is cause we are scared to slow our sales and move venues.