Hi Just wanted to let everyone know about my site in Australia.

Not another auction clone - direct ecommerce seller to buyer
No listing fee's
No final sale fee's
just a low monthly subsciption for the service.


Good Luck with your search for alternatives in the rest of the world.

We have one here and it works very well.

Thank You
Phill Downey

So tell us, how is the boycott going in Australia?

Hi shakespearesarani,

Well we have made contact with the Underground Power Sellers of Australia and the person who started the site - at the moment about two hundred power sellers are reviewing our site and they have pledged to come over and try us out. I think they are growing by about 50 new members per week. This is noware near the numbers in the Nthn Hemisphere but we run a bit behind in trends.

The word is that eBay here will not look after anybody - they couldnt care less and there is zero dialogue and only grief for people who are getting marginalised by fee's ..............so its basically the same story.

Curious though some of the sellers dont even know that fee's have changed and feedback has changed.

Good Luck and thanks for asking

Cheers
Phill

Best of luck to you! We tend to be a little behind the times in Alaska too, but this time it seems to be quite different! I hope your site snowballs! Have you advertised it on the ebay discussion boards?

Hi in Alaska - wow! never done that before.............talked to Alaska I mean. Calgary, Vancouver, Banff. Toronto is as North as i have been.

Which eBay discussions boards do you mean - I guess there are many of them? Do you have any links ?

I will search generically as well to start.

Thanks for the advice

Cheers
Phill

Hi Phil,
That surprises me. We have so many Australians up here!
If you go to your ebay.com.au my ebay page, there is a selection of links at the top right of the page. Under the "community" link you will find boards such as "chin yap" and some others. I posted a how's the boycott doing over here question, but have been far too busy to follow up on it. That's how I found this site; through the discussion boards. The US discussion boards are filled with boycott chatter. You can post on those too, by the way.
So far, I've hit the UK, Canada and Australia. If this boycott is really going to be effective, it needs to be completely global.

Keep your chin up, Meg

Hey Meg - Aussies huh! cant keep them down.

Are they travelling or living / working? And where abouts are you? Anchorage or somewhere? One of my favourite songs by Michelle Shocked.

The last time anyway tried to start a thread inside ebYA Australia about us it last about 60 seconds before they pulled it - they know we are here dont you worry about that.

Anyway we had a nice radio interview last night and the DJ said Interview coming with the boys from Sellmystuff and they will tell you why we should use this Aussie site instead of eBay ..........LOL.

It was great - we are making headway but have only been live for 7 months or so.

Its all fun

Kind Regards
Phill

naw, you guys are always climbing to the top! I'm in a little town of 150 people called moose pass. I was raised in the bush. Spent several years in Anchorage and will never go back. Too many y***s!

Glad you got on the airwaves. We need that here.

excellent - i will look it up - Moose Pass huh?

very small indeed at 150 people -

Wow! I finally looked up sellmystuff. Very nice! Do people there ship to the US. I found a lamp I gotta have.

Wow! I finally looked up sellmystuff. Very nice! Do people there ship to the US. I found a lamp I gotta have.

Best Ebay Alternative

Ebay Alternative - A better deal for all Ebay Users
I have been a great fan of Ebay for a number of years and have bought and sold on it almost on a weekly basis. But as a seller, one of the drawbacks I have found with Ebay is the high cost of their fees. It is true that ebay does allow eBay Store owners to reduce their fees by referring their customers by a special url (although only Ebay.com users can do this), but still the fees can take quite a chunk out of your profits.

The problem is that Ebay dominates the online auction market and has milliions of visitors every day. This has meant that it's sellers often get a raw deal when it comes to fees, especially it's international customers. These fees can be a deterant to anyone who wants start up a business selling on online auctions.

Well, I finally went and visited www.SellMyStuff.com.au today, and I must say it is a very attractive and nicely designed site, with a different "take" on online selling than most of the sites I look at.

It is set up to work for anyone from a casual seller - $5 for 5 listings for 30 days, to a regular seller - $10 for 30 listings for 30 days, to a large business - $90/month for unlimited listings, all pay-in-advance, not auto-re-billed, and up/down-gradeable. They offer several "refinements" like pay-now, and shop fronts - more at higher levels. All personal contact is allowed/encouraged as are links to ones own website and shopping cart. Listings can be removed/added at any time within the total. They also offer ebay import. There are no other fees that I saw.

A buyer can search by keywords (both in title or description) and location, browse shops or by categories, and sign up for email alerts for new listings matching a search. I did not like that a browse by major category is limited to 1 page of most recent results. It can be annoying to have to click through multiple subcategories in some cases. You might consider allowing subsequent pages to be fetched if requested.

Google has 8000+ pages indexed for this site, and their page Titles, URLs, and Descriptions appear to be designed very well for SEO to my eyes. Unfortunately, they do not also appear to be feeding to Google Products, though I do not know how much this might matter in Australia, as Google.com.au (like Google.ca) provides no direct Shopping link on that page. http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Asellmystuff.com.au&filter=0

This site might be well worth considering for Australian sellers looking to expand a website's web-presence, or just needing a place other than eBay. I was not able to obtain any sell-through data, and total listings would need to be manually added up by subcategories - but my general impression of listings total is around 3-5000? I would be happy to be pointed to an easy way to obtain these data.

I only regret that I did not look at this site sooner (mostly because of the country limitation). I wish you the best of luck with your growth.

Purple Reading Giraffe - thanks so much for your comments! its really gratifying to have a review like that and we very much appreciate the feedback.

I believe we are running about 8 months behind the US in take up trend but things are going well for us. We are working on the SEO furiously - because its actually been very poor and our results will now be a lot more dynamic. We just moved a raft of enhancements requested by our users up to the site and we have more coming. The developers are working on the Google Base feed as we speak and we realise that will be a big thing.

Listings are sitting around 25,000 and we have nearly 6,000 members.

On the international front - we are receiving almost daily requests from the US and the UK to offer up for all - but we had to get some ducks in a row on the local front first.

We are a happy community and we listen hard to our users.

Thanks again for the comments - we will take the suggestions on board

Watch this space

Kind Regards
Phill Downey & Glenn Fry
Owners - www.sellmystuff.com.au

Hi Again - Purple Reading Giraffe.

We will fix the browsing issue that you mentioned - its a good idea; so thanks for that.

You are right abot no more fee's - there is nothing else to pay. the reason we went with Pre-Paid plans is that it does cost something to develop / run and host a site and we decided that we didnt want to distract people with loads of banner ads through which we might derive income. So we have kept the site clean of ads.

We analysed the market in depth and decided that a Fractional Service Provider model was the way to go. Free doesn't work and having the seller with a small amount of commitment up front makes them think harder about the items they put up and how they price to the market. If its all free - the site just gets loaded with overpriced junk or 1 cent items that no one really wants.

So its all about having good content and really good items that people want to buy and a nice place to shop.

The openness with communication was implemented to get away from the big brother and intimidation style that all of you would be familiar with.

So thats it from Aussie for the moment - we did like your post very much and wonder if we can have permission to use it in our Blog (with acknowledgement of course)

Kind Regards
Phill Downey & Glenn Fry
The Sellmystuff Guys