posted on February 10, 2001 12:56:13 PM new
I am looking into other auction venues. It would be really useful to apply the five star system of rating (not my favorite, but useful) to the "other" auction venues. How would you rate the following and please feel free to add any other venues that you've had experience with. Please expand the categories if needed.
Customer traffic fees ease of use
Amazon
eBay
Yahoo
Half.com
Bidville
Bidbay
NBCi
Popula
(please add more)
posted on February 11, 2001 02:34:12 PM new
Please add edeal.com they have been growing by leaps and bounds in the last year. NO fees for listing (unless you want extras)! Ease of use for relisting is amazing. Just check off the ones you want, you can relist 25 items in less than a minute. Chat room people are extremely helpful. AuctionWatch has done a profile in the past on this site, all positive.
posted on February 11, 2001 03:18:03 PM new
Bidville ***** - Was gonna rate them 4-1/2, but gave em the extra half ro effort and being young. The only thing they currently ned is a photo gallery then it's Ya- Who???
I have 77 auctions listed currently with 14 pending with bids, 3 others closed successful, I deadbeat. I sell glass and china mostly. Some of the stuff I listed I was going to take to a local absolute auction anyway, so I listed it at $1.00 no reserve, now I have multiple bids on a number of these. It drives the excitement and helps get the bidders in.
POOTAH **1/2 Again partially for effort, great CS. They now have a photo gallery but still few bidders and not many listers. I hope this site will get better, but I am a bit disappointed at the listings and results for Glass and china. I understand some other categories do well enough there though, especially jewelry.
Epier (-)* Did not like this site at all. Found it to be very slow loading pages, and confusing technically,(course I may be the brightest bulb in the box.)
Never got any response to emailing their CS. Have been told by others that to get CS, you need to go into their chat room. Why have the email address then?
LYCOS (-)** could not even get the registration and response thingy straight there.
posted on February 11, 2001 03:21:10 PM new
Bidville/Auxpal are the same thing. I would rank them 3 stars. Wonderful for sellers, easy to use and great customer service. However, the most important thing in an auction site is buyers. I am penalizing them 2 stars, for the lack of buyers.
Glen
posted on February 11, 2001 04:18:33 PM new
Bidville is the #1 free site. The new Yahoo (so to speak). Actually, that's an insult to Bidville because, unlike Yahoo, they are very receptive to suggestions from their users and have excellent customer service.
posted on February 11, 2001 04:42:36 PM new
This email was on the bidville site. What company is nobidding inc?
Email Outage 02.10.01
BidVille.com email servers were offline from midday 2/10/01 until 2/11/01 at 10:00am EST.
At approximately 2:00pm EST on 2/10/01, Bidville email servers were offline. Our technicians became aware of the situation immediately and responded appropriately. We feel it is in the best interest of every member to be aware of the situation, its causes and what has been done to prevent a similar issue in the future.
Members may have received emails that were difficult to interpret and contained html coding. These emails were most likely the typical emails you would receive after placing a bid or when an item is won. However, the information contained in the emails can be best described as "jibberish".
Admittedly, the cause of the email failure is still not clear to us. In fact, our programs needed to be rewritten to use a completely different type of email system. The original email system still seems to be having this trouble and will no longer be used. Our best guess is that it was simply overworked.
During this outage, you may have tried to contact us by email. Unfortunately, we received the same type of garbled messages that you did. There was no way to reply to your requests because the emails received by us were not interpretable. We apologize if it seemed like our customer service took a vacation yesterday. We didn't!
We suspect that members joining yesterday were unable to complete their registration because confirmation emails were unavailable. They will be resent shortly.
Please realize that once this problem was defined, all private information such as passwords and phone numbers were blocked from our database in order to protect your security. We do not believe that there was ever a breach of your personal information during this time.
It appears that emails are now cleared up and the new email programs are much faster than the originals. Please accept my deepest apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you and your own email systems. It must have been very confusing!
We apologize for this interruption of service and hope you will continue to grow with us.
posted on February 11, 2001 05:41:05 PM new
I think it is very hard to judge a site as excellent or poor because each site sells better in some categories.
Example: I'm doing great at Bidville in crafts, but I've heard from some sellers that it is a "no show" for them in antiques. I've also been looking around different areas at Bidville and don't see any activity in books. I tried SnapRat with crafts and received not one bid. Yahoo was a great auction for clothing, but so far Bidville has not been that hot.
ePier has a lot of crafts listed and active, but it drives me so crazy with the slow loading, I've not listed anything there. Someone mentioned that it was my ISP, but Bidville is loading fine and the numbers of new auctions are growing fast.
So, there you have it. What are people selling at the different auction sites? I'm now branching out into several different auctions, looking for the appropriate place for my "stuff".
posted on February 11, 2001 05:58:41 PM new
I've only managed to list 5 things, all cookbooks. When I view the site I am bothered that so many books are still in the original generic categories like "nonfiction". I am worried that they will be just relisted under those headings indefinitely, vs the sellers bothering to relist them under the new, more specific categories.
Other than that, I get a lot of book action on ebay, and sell pretty briskly on Amazon and half.com, too, so I know people are buying books. They didn't buy that often on Yahoo, though, and I worry that the same will hold true on Bidville. But it's still early days...
posted on February 11, 2001 08:02:19 PM new
Thanks, everyone, for your useful comments. I really appreciate the input. Also, thank you auctiongaurd for the additional threads calling for site ratings. Everyone's comments and opinions really do help.
