Hi there my fellow ebayers.

I was wondering if you have noticed that ebay has gone to the dogs?

What I mean by that is there is no more room for the little guy to compete against the Big boy companies that have made their way to ebay killing any chances us little guys have of making a buck.

How are we supposed to compete against them? They can get and sell stuff cheaper than we can. Plus they can sell at a loss and just write it off where we can't.

Now if you put something up most of the time you don't get any bids till the last day or so and most of the time if will not sell for very much cause it got sniped or there is a big boy selling it cheaper than you, and as if that wasn't bad enough the Big boys get a major shipping discount as where we the little guy does not.

And now ebay is restricting the graphics and things that you can do to your auctions to try and make you pay for their extra stuff and graphics.
That's just wrong.
So how are we supposed to compete when ebay is catering to the big boys and not the clients that made them.

I thought it was bad with all the shill bidding but that is nothing compared to eBay turning it's back on the little sellers.

Now I know that things might be different if you sell art or customer items but people like me who sold comics and toys got killed off by the big boys.

But with all the smaller sellers dropping like flys the bigger stores are starting to jack the prices because they killed off their competition. The sad thing was that eBay actually encouraged it.

So now I have closed down my shop and gone back to selling at comic conventions and sci fi cons.

So is it just me or has it gone to the dogs?

This is the Wal-Mart versus the Mom n' Pop Store all over again. So many businesses have gone under because Wal-Mart has moved to town and no one seems to care because they can get their tube socks for 50 cents less now.

Here's what I would do if I were you. I would start a comic book blog site and use something like e-junkie.com to fulfill your shopping cart and inventory needs. Blog your heart out about what you love...comics. Build the blog as much as you can by getting backlinks through directories, social bookmarking, article directories and getting links from other comic bloggers. When your site outside of ebay gains page rank and search result position...you can then link to your ebay listings and get traffic from something more than just the ebay browsers.

Plus you'll have a lot of fun building a website about something that you like. Once the blog gets page rank, and thus linking power..then you can backlink to your ebay listings and have more success.

I think the days of relying on just ebay traffic to support a successful selling enterprise are over and we'll have to rely on other internet tactics to make sales. The one part about ebay I like these days is the fact that they provide rss feeds for your store and auction listings. I'm glad I spent the last year figuring out how to exploit that technology...

James

Absolutely.They are definitely looking to support the high volume sellers.
People like us just can't compete.About 4 years ago the average Mum & Dad seller could make some nice pocket money,but now no chance.