Selling: Amazon vs eBay

I have recently started using Amazon, not for the common reason that most people have to buy, but to sell. I'm sure like many of you do, I myself have a lot of games lying around that were good in their time, but no longer serve me any purpose and I don't think I will ever play again, and I wanted to sell!

Therefore I am going to explain the differences between Amazon, what I am using, and eBay, which I have used in the past, and will be best for you.

Now a lot of people see eBay as the best place to go to sell your unwanted things, including Video Games, and it can be good, but I believe that with my experiences with Amazon I have found that Amazon itself is better for this specific job. The list below details all the things that I think go better on Amazon and all the things that should really be on eBay:

Amazon

• Video Games
• Consoles
• Electricals (Mainly entertainment)
• Books (including eBooks)

eBay

• Clothes
• Fan based items (e.g. signed photo/signed shirt)
• Modeling/Art (e.g. Warhammer)
• Tools (e.g. Power tools)
• Cars (not too confident about eBay motors but since Amazon doesn't sell cars at all this is the best of the two

Now what practically everyone who is selling items via the internet wants to do, is maximize their profits. I have based the above lists partially on this, so selling books on Amazon for example, will generally reap more cash than if you sold the same book on eBay (obviously there will be exceptions but its a basic guideline)


What do they both charge when selling?


Now both companies are out to make money, and will charge you on different things when selling your item. I'm going to compare the two and what they involve:



Amazon fees

Listing: A massive advantage of Amazon is that there is no listing fee
Percentage of Price if Sold: 17.25% of the sales price (11.5% for Electronics & Photo items)
Other: Individuals selling at Marketplace pay a GBP 0.86 per item completion fee (which is $0.99)

eBay fees

Listing: What eBay do is they have a listing fee that is based on your initial Starting price of the auction. If you start it high you are charged more than if you start it lower. This fee is paid even if your item is never sold.
Percentage of Price if Sold: It is around 10% but it is quite complicated so you can go here to see all the different charges for listing and final value fees for eBay
Other:They also charge you more if you include a Reserve Price, Buy It Now, Scheduled Listings and/or Format Enhancements.

From this we can see that Amazon collects all your fees at the end of selling, meaning if you never sell it, you don't have to pay anything. However the final percentage is quite a bit bigger than that of eBay


Ease of Use


So now we have gotten the fees out of the way, i'm going to discuss how easy the two are to use:

Amazon

Amazon's website is incredibly easy to use. All you need to do is select a category, search for whatever you want to sell and then select it. You then simply need to put in its condition if its Used, what price your putting it as( it shows the lowest price that there is making it easy for you to assess the market) and how many you are selling. And that's it. If the item you are selling is already in the enormous database of products that Amazon has, then all the technical specifications and details are already there and you don't need to write anything about it. (If something you want to sell is not in their database then you can create a new one I believe although I haven't had to do this at all). This makes listing things on Amazon very fast and very easy.

eBay

I find eBay's website a bit harder to use than Amazon's. Actually listing your product is easy as you can put in anything you want which is an advantage of eBay, but once you've chosen the category and name of the item you are selling you then have to write in a description of the product you are selling. This often needs to be quite long for people to be convinced enough to bid on your item although you can easily copy the product information from another website, this adds more time onto the process.

Postage and Packaging


Both Amazon and eBay have P&P programs in action.

With eBay, it is the seller who determines the P&P, and he can put this at any price he sees the item will take to send.

With Amazon however there is set fees for P&P, and so when you list your item this is autmatically added.




Traffic

In terms of how many potential customers there are for each then I do believe they are quite similar, but it is the way the searches work in Amazon that puts it ahead of eBay.

When you search in eBay for a product as a seller, you get all the different products there in front of you as a list. This means that the amount of people that could potentially buy your product is split between a lot of competition.

There is not this problem in Amazon however. If a buyer come along and searches for your product, there will be probably only one product that matches exactly what he wants. He will then proceed to click on this and all the Used and New prices will be displayed nearby. Also if your item is the cheapest of all the items with the same condition then people will almost always go for your product.

I would also like to make a point here that I personally would view Amazon as a more trustworthy place to go, and I'm sure many people do the same but just don't realise it. I therefore think that people will be more inclined to come to Amazon than eBay especially if they are planning on spending a lot of money.


Conclusion

So I'm going to try and make a conclusion to this and try and answer the original question: Which is Better?

I think that both Amazon and eBay have both their own pros and cons to them. For example Amazon may not charge you for listing your product in the first place but they charge you more when you do sell your item. Also eBay is very popular meaning alot of people will look at it, but also this means there are alot of items similar to yours being sold so the traffic is split dramatically.

And so i would like to originate back to my original list of what each website is best for, as I think that seems to sum up what i have said. I would say however that I do prefer Amazon to eBay and find it a very good method for selling my games.

Thats all for now,
Laters