I used to sell used books for a low margin on eBay until last year when they reduced the number of free listings and at the same time increased their fees, so it was no longer viable for me. I want to continue selling and I was seriously considering using eBid, but I really have my doubts about them. Firstly, as others have pointed out before me, there are no listing fees, so once sellers have paid their £49.99 where is eBid's further income coming from? I'm no economist, but there must come a point when most of the sellers who want to try eBid have paid up, and the number of new applicants diminishes to little more than a trickle. So I ask again, where does eBid get any more money from? It gives me the impression that once they have your money they just sit back and put their feet up. Secondly, no eBid items come up in online searches. If you want to buy something, what's the next thing you do after looking on Amazon and Ebay? Some people have not even heard of eBid, while if you did know of it, it might not be the first thing you would think of. It's much easier to simply google what you are looking for, isn't it? Fine, but you won't see anything from eBid. Try it for yourself. As an example, if I do a search for the title of an out of print book, I'll get results for Amazon, Abebooks, eBay and others, but not eBid. So what use is a site where potential buyers don't know the items are there? Taking used books as an example again, another worry is the lack of items for sale. There is a long-running series of titles called New Naturalists, these are highly collectable and prices run from quite low up to hundreds of pounds per book. I've just looked on eBay, where there are uncountable numbers of them, possibly running into four figures. How many are there on eBid? Just five titles, and I'm pretty sure they're the same ones I saw there last year. From a seller's point of view, people aren't going to bother to look where there is less chance of them finding what they want. I suspect it means that sellers are simply not willing to pay £49.99 to eBid when there is little chance of recouping it. To me there is little doubt that I would simply be chucking my money away.

I started selling on US eBid a couple year ago and today I decided to shut my store down and move my products to a few other productive sites. eBid has several steps to make before I consider it worth the time to list on there. I paid for a lifetime membership and fortunately I made that fee back. For sellers, price comparison for sold items is joke and the ratio of sales to non sales is down right sad. The business expects the customers and sellers to do their leg work for getting the word out which is ludicrous. If they can't push their site into the real world on their own and are willing to still charge sellers to pay for the service, (which the seller would make eBid money on the sales final value fee), then this site is no more than a cash hog and will slowly go the way of the Dodo bird. I hope they make the need improvements