If you don’t like the fact that eBay keeps increasing its item listing fees for its sellers, there are alternative online auction sites for people to visit. However, since they’re not as well known as eBay due to their lack of publicity, you may not find the item(s) you’re looking for.
There are many different online auction websites other than eBay, but you wouldn’t normally come across them unless, well, you saw this article. You see, because eBay is an online marketing giant, some of its smaller competitors get overlooked by the general population. As of January 17, 2009, I’ve compiled a complete list of the 18 major alternative online auction websites currently on the internet.
In 1999, Allegro came to existence as a Polish online auction website. One year after its debut, the company was bought over by QXL (later known as Tradus and then Naspers). According to recent statistics, Allegro is the 192nd most-visited website in the entire world, with over 7 million registered users.
My Review Rating: 8/10
In 1995, Amazon.com was launched by its creator Jeff Bezos. It was originally designed to be just an online bookstore, but it eventually evolved to include all kinds of merchandise, including electronics, video games, food and even furniture. In 2007, Amazon made approximately $14.8 billion in revenue.
My Review Rating: 9/10
Apex Auctions is a relatively small company founded in 2002 that specializes in the selling of CNC and manual machine tools. In 2007, it sold the Swan Hunter shipyard.
My Review Rating: 4/10
BidorBuy, founded in 1999, is the largest online auction site in South Africa. Originally, the company was going to launch several other international versions of BidorBuy, but then decided only to open up an Australian version and an Indian version. The Australian site closed down in 2001 and the Indian site was bought over by eBay in 2004. BidorBuy is now only a South African site.
My Review Rating: 6/10
Bidtopia, founded in 2007, was originally designed to be a private site for one of eBay’s largest sellers – a company by the name of Bargainland. Since its launch, the site has now allowed other sellers to register accounts and sell items. Bidtopia has been criticized for charging new bidders a 99-cent sign-up fee just for the sole purposes of verifying the bidder’s identity and ability to pay. In 2008, a tornado destroyed all of Bidtopia’s business offices.
My Review Rating: 4/10
DoveBid was originally founded in 1937 and then later proceeded to create an online internet version of the company. It’s mainly designed as an auction website for machinery, equipment, inventory and real estate. In 2008, the company was bought over by long-time rival GoIndustry.
My Review Rating: 4/10
The London, England company known as eBid originally debuted in 1999 to compete against rival company eBay. What’s most unique about eBid is that unlike eBay, there is no mandatory item listing fee. This means you only pay eBid if your item sells, and the fee is a low 3% of the final auction price.
My Review Rating: 8/10
GunBroker.com is an online auction website dedicated purely to the sale and auctioning of firearms.
My Review Rating: 4/10
Lixtor is an online auction website based in New Zealand that made its first appearance in 2005. It started up on the basis that instead of charging its users mandatory item listing fees and item selling fees, it would make its profit solely from the revenue obtained from its advertisers. Although it can become a real threat to eBay, as of January 2009, the site doesn’t have that many items up for sale.
My Review Rating: 5/10
The English translation of the word “MercadoLibre” is “Free Market.” However, the site is partnered with eBay, and both its Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are essentially identical to eBay. Therefore, I bet within a few years, MercadoLibre will be either bought over by eBay and shut down, or transformed into another one of eBay’s international sites.
My Review Rating: 5/10
Overstock.com prides itself on purchasing surplus inventory of companies at below-wholesale prices, then passing on those savings to its consumers. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, I took a look at the site and found plenty of merchandise, but their electronics section is way too expensive. They should change their name from Overstock.com to Overpriced.com! Can you believe they want over $600.00 for a Nintendo Wii with only two games, a steering wheel, a 32 GB memory card, an 8-in-1 accessories kit, and a lens cleaner for the Wii’s laser?
However, based on the fact that the site has a neat design and lots of items for sale, I will slightly bump up my review rating of the company.
My Review Rating: 6/10
“It’s Aussie for Auction” is the slogan used by Australia’s 2nd largest online auction website. Like eBid and Lixtor, the company does not charge its sellers a fee to list items on its site, which is why it’s such a popular alternative to eBay. However, sellers must provide verification prior to being accepted as a registered member on the site. As of January 2009, the site has over 300,000 members and over 750,000 items for sale.
My Review Rating: 9/10
Prosper.com is an online auction website dedicated purely to the sale and auctioning of personal loans. The site works on a unique concept in that you, the borrower, post a listing displaying the amount of money you’d like to borrow and the interest rate you want to pay. Lenders bid on your auction trying to get your business by offering you a portion of the money you want, and then specifying their minimum interest rate on the loan.
However, as we all know, loans, like mortgages, are never a good concept. As months and years pass by, you end up paying hundreds and thousands of dollars in interest. Therefore, it’s best to avoid this site.
My Review Rating: 5/10
SalvageSale is essentially a duplicate copy of Overstock.com, selling insurance and surplus inventory of other companies – what they refer to as “salvaged goods.” What separates SalvageSale from most of the other online auction sites is the fact that bidders cannot place “last-minute bids” on auctions. This results in a somewhat fairer format, as each bid on an item extends the auction’s closing time by 5 minutes, so counter-bidders will have plenty of opportunity to decide whether or not they’d like to post another bid.
My Review Rating: 5/10
As of January 2009, TradeMe is the largest online auction website in New Zealand. It was founded in 1999 and sold off to Fairfax in 2006. The site currently has over 2 million registered users and over 1 million items for sale. A unique fact about TradeMe is that in 2005, someone posted an auction listing selling a time machine. The current bid reached over $300 billion before the seller withdrew the auction prior to its ending.
My Review Rating: 9/10
In the past, Tradus was one of the most popular online auction websites in Europe. In March 2008, Tradus was taken over by Naspers. Since that point in time, the company ceased being an auction site, and thus delisted from the London Stock Exchange. It’s interesting to note that Naspers owns Allegro.
My Review Rating: N/A – Naspers itself is not an online auction site.
The site uBid offers items sold by the company itself and the company’s pre-approved merchants. The company was founded in 1997 and has since claimed to provide more secure transactions than its main competitor eBay. This auction site has tons of electronics for sale, but also specializes in jewelry, watches, televisions, computers, and other items as well. However, to be a member of uBid, you must be a U.S. citizen.
My Review Rating: 7/10
This, I did not expect to find. Yahoo! stopped new auctions from being listed on its site as of June 3, 2007, and closed down all of its auctions as of June 16, 2007. I guess they no longer wanted to be a part of the online auction community. In the 1990’s, Yahoo! was one of eBay’s main competitors, but as of the early 2000’s, the popularity of Yahoo! Auctions began to decline. The number of people posting items on Yahoo! Auctions kept on falling, and so did the number of people bidding on those auctions.
My Review Rating: N/A – Yahoo! Auctions no longer exist.
Read More of My Articles:
A Complete Seller’s Guide: Part 1 – All of eBay’s Online Auction Fees
A Complete Seller’s Guide: Part 2 – All of PayPal’s Money Transaction Fees
Battle of the Internet Browsers: Who Will Claim Victory?·
Digg: Digging Itself Deeper and Deeper Into the Ground·
Top 10 Reasons Why Your Triond Content is Declined or Sent Back for Revision·
January 18th, 2009 at 5:32 am
i learn something new every day good job.
January 18th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
This is great information! Thanks for posting this. I’ll definitely make use of it.
January 19th, 2009 at 8:17 am
Very useful. I really enjoy amazon out of all these sites the most.
February 4th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Brand new free ebay alternative website. No listing fees or monthly fees
February 4th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
New ebay alternative website. http://www.dormbay.com
March 12th, 2009 at 6:07 am
a decent list
http://www.AlternatviesToEbay.com
April 7th, 2009 at 4:51 am
I would of gave eBid 9/10,Only because out of the 5 alternatives sites i list on i sell the most on eBid.
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:36 pm
The new old ebay
Hello,
I wanted to invite sellers and buyers to try out our new website at http://www.efleaa.com we are the new old ebay.
Someone once said give me a site that is at least 50 percent like ebay and with ebay fees of the 90s and I will begin to sell and make money again on that site.
We believe efleaa is that site with no listing fees and low final value fees, you can get a booth or just list on the site, you can list a thousand items or for that user that might just want to list that occasional one item, efleaa is the place to go.
We have auction formats or buy it now formats and buyers and sellers can talk live with each other in private in the Barter box.
Buyers will find it easy to navigate the site for efleaa has the look and feel of ebay.
The site is growing in members daily and going up the ranks in online search engines.
The site is not artificially grown, but has grown organically over the last few months and that is the way efleaa will continue to grow.
Come on over to http://www.efleaa.com and give us a try,we are efleaa, we are you.
Jerry Whitney.
June 28th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
http://www.iBuyCo.com is the new eBay alternative auction site that allows people to buy, sell, trade and swap goods & services without having to deal with the exorbitant fees charged by other auction sites. iBuyCo was launched in 2009 and committed to provide these services at the lowest possible cost to its customers. iBuyCo based its foundation on providing superior service to its customers based on customer needs, not corporate greed. We will continue to provide improvements to our site based on our customer’s input & recommendations.
The site offers a wide verity of membership to accommodate every seller needs.
We are in the process of adding eBay, Overstock feedback & listings transfer feature.
Every instant purchase item is automatically uploaded to Google product search feed to create a larger exposure of the product being offered on the site.
We hope to see you at http://www.ibuyco.com
iBuyCo, LLC
September 14th, 2009 at 7:35 am
Great articles.Would have to say http://www.thedeadskunk.com will take some value for money beating when it comes to true auction sites.Free to list,fab item swap feature plus digital downloads, and super cheap monthly store fees where you can sell as many as 3000 items per month for only £20 with no other F.V.F.’S or picture upload fees.
Absolutely none!
May 18th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
A great eBay alternative is http://www.OnlineAuctioning.com – They are 100% free. You can list 10,000 items if you want to, and there’s no commissions, no final value fees, nothing. That’s why I like this auction, I can sell a car for $10,000 and keep it all. That’s how an online auction should be, open & social.
November 12th, 2010 at 3:09 am
So many great eBay alternative online auction sites. I love greatauctions.net. It’s one heck of a online auction site.
December 7th, 2010 at 10:35 pm
Great list. Many of the more unusual ones here.
We have just launched the world’s first pay per bid auction marketplace. To date any pay per bid (penny auctions, lowest unique bid, reveal the price etc) site has only listed items themselves, not offered independent sellers access.
It’s called Exceet auctions and is located at http://exceet.com
Hate to come on here and plug our business but we think you’ll really appreciate an alternative selling marketplace to the traditional auction models. There’s tons of information on our site. So many of the complaints I read about we have as advantages on our site. Free unlimited listing, always getting paid, no shipping fees issues (included in the price), humans that want you to succeed, fair feedback, limited competition as we’re new, ability to earn above retail prices (given the pay per bid model) and much more. we’d love you to check us out. Thanks
January 8th, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Alternatives to Ebay are common, Ealtbay.com, too, is an alternative to Ebay,it targets the items that are perfectly legal to own and sell, but are banned on Ebay. Have you ever tried to list an ivory bangle, or a vintage bear skin rug on Ebay? If you did, you discovered that your listing was ended by Ebay, you were charged all listing fees, and were warned if you repeated such an action -you would be suspended as a seller. Ealtbay allows such items, lets you list them for free, charges very low final value fees, and does not require Paypal to finish the transaction. Now that is an alternative to auction site!
January 30th, 2011 at 4:53 pm
I am so tired of all these ebay clones popping up left and right, most of which are just ugly as. If you want to try something different either give http://www.Buzzmart.com a try or if you want to open a shop Addoway is another good alternative. These two marketplaces are much more fun, free and have revolutionized the online marketplace market…my 2 cents
June 12th, 2011 at 11:58 pm
norila.com Norila is an ebay alternative auction site ,Any seller can created a free online store there ,you can use Paypal ,moneybookers ,google checkout payment as payment gateway , and the most important thing is they do not charge any fee until sold items .If You suck of Ebay and ioffer suspended your account .you realy should try this new site !
May 3rd, 2012 at 11:59 am
Try http://www.algarveauctions.com Portugals answer to Ebay! With zero listing fees and zero commissions. Enjoy!
June 1st, 2012 at 5:49 pm
Brand new free ebay alternative website. No listing fees or monthly fees.
Shopthriftshop.com
November 30th, 2012 at 11:23 am
Tired of those high auction fees? Well try http://www.uptownbidz.com/index.php where registration is always free and our fees are always low. You can open your own free store front to sell all of your merchandise or you can buy merchandise from our members.