By Alice Delore
It’s been said a thousand times before on ecommerce blogs all over the Web: eBay is becoming overcrowded, overpriced and therefore is not delivering most sellers there the sales volumes they need to successfully run their businesses.
In the last four or five years, many, many “eBay alternatives” have started up, and bombed out, as once again, online sellers were facing marketplaces that, like eBay, were not allowing the sales volumes that sellers need.
However, more recently, a new breed of marketplaces has emerged. The major difference between the old generation and this new breed and of alternative marketplaces, such as Addoway, Rubylane, Bonanza and ArtFire, is the fact that the new ones have managed to positively capture seller attention, enabling them to stay in business past the 12 month mark.
Let’s take a closer look at what else these new marketplaces have in common:
Stronger communities
“Come for the sales, stay for the community” appears to be the mantra for emerging marketplaces. When sellers flock to new ones like Addoway and ArtFire they are seduced by the active and supportive communities they find there; sellers helping sellers, marketplace managers and executives answering questions on the forums and welcoming new sellers to the site.
While these marketplaces can’t deliver the streams of traffic that giants like eBay and Amazon can, their communities offer them a lot of redemption and earn them loyalty from sellers who stand by the sites and help them grow.
Fast growth
New startup sites seeing levels of grow is not uncommon, but good marketplaces tend to experience growth rates that remind us of the golden dotcom years. Addoway.com, for example, released its beta version publically in April 2010, and by just July 2010, surpassed the 100,000 sales milestone.
Lower fees
As part of the quest to differentiate themselves from eBay, the new marketplaces operate on low or no seller fees. Others have started with a no fee policy and soon realized that in order to grow their sites and pull more buyers, they need to collect fees from sellers.
Most, including Bonanza and Addoway, go about this by offering zero listing fees but taking a small percentage cut of the final sale price. By structuring their fees this way, site owners provide sellers a risk-free trial for selling on the site: You don’t pay listing fees, so if you don’t make a sale, nothing is lost.
‘Platform’-style marketplaces with promotion of external product listings
As part of the mission to keep sellers loyal while buyer traffic increases (a long-term endeavor), new marketplaces are positioning themselves as ‘platforms’ where sellers occupy space on the site to promote their listings. The innovative part here is that sellers can also link buyers directly to their listings on other sites like eBay or their own websites. eBay, on the other hand, is very strict about linking to product listings outside of their fee catchment.
Above all else, what we are seeing now is a major shift from marketplace giants like eBay and Amazon who essentially “sell traffic” – to sellers to convert to sales – to these marketplaces which establish themselves as platforms that provide a tool for sellers to use to grow their business.
Are you an eBay seller? Which of these features would entice you to sell on these new and emerging marketplaces?
Alice Delore is an education specialist for SaleHoo.com, an online community of over 95,000 online sellers and retailers. Their product range consists of an online selling course, ecommerce software and their flagship product, a wholesale directory.
Image courtesy Karen Axelton
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