While eBay is a huge online market place, let's look at some other alternatives where you can sell online. There are several reasons to get yourself familiar with these, the main one being that the more presence you have, then the more products you can sell.
Another common trend is maybe you're not happy with eBay for any reason, or you want to minimize selling costs or effort to set up operations. Some of the platforms discussed below are large and others are very specialized for a specific interest or public.
When browsing, please keep an open mind for all kinds of opportunities. Depending on where you are and what you're doing, one person's sale might be your buying opportunity.
Amazon
This is a great place to check if you want to avoid PayPal fees, and especially if you're into selling used branded items. For the more advanced people, there is also a way to create your brands but this tends to be costly.
For me, selling used books on Amazon was a blast compared to doing the same on eBay. I never had to write any descriptions or take photos, just describing the condition was enough to make a used book sale going.
Craigslist
The look and feel of Craigslist are so old, that it's almost refreshing to visit it. However, its power should not be underestimated... It has consistently been in the top 100 websites for many years now. You can list almost anything for sale here and for free.
This is a great place to sell bulky stuff. Some good examples are furniture, rugs and washing machines. And besides this, you should check out your local listings once in a while for a good bargain. Many eBayer sellers shop around here and it's easy to make a quick buck. Be sure to check out their "free" listings too, for items people will just give away!
Facebook marketplace
In my opinion, this is a young portal and it's still developing. It looks like an alternative to Craigslist. The biggest benefits are there are no fees, and you have a very good local reach (basically your friends). If you're going for a local market at no cost, then check it out.
Whenever I see a cool new tool like this, I like to try it for a bit, but will not try to base my entire business here. With recent Facebook developments, and how fast they change things over there, it would not be surprising to wake up one morning and see it shut down. That being said, do go over there and see if it brings you business.
Etsy
A perfect place to start selling if your product is anything related to crafts. The fees are quite nice too, at just $0.20 per item sold, plus 3.5% for payment processing. Hand made arts sell very well here because the portal is specialized towards this customer group.
And it's a popular website too, with over 30 million reported items sold last year.
Shopify
In recent years, there has been a bit of a shift among online sellers to try and get more control over their businesses. For example, not every eBay seller agrees with how eBay handles buyer complaints and returns. Shopify is a new platform where you can set up your shop. Be warned though, it will be considerable effort to get working, and there's even a monthly fee. But the benefits could be worthwhile for you, and you get new possibilities with things like dropshipping!
A common way to use this among sellers is to quickly set up a sales website for a small product, and then launch several marketing campaigns that all point back to this shop. So, there might be YouTube videos, blog posts, Facebook posts and so on, and these all forward the user back to the shop. The competition is high, but often worth it.
AliExpress
At the moment, only China mainland and Russia residents are allowed to sell on this platform. But that doesn't mean you can't participate soon, because we expect the rules for AliExpress sellers will be changing to allow more countries to join. This is something to keep an eye on, and especially the Alibaba portal below.
In recent years the "Ali"-group has become so powerful, that it's even threatening Amazon's business. When all your competitors are thinking about buying from Ali and selling on eBay, it only makes sense to see how you can position yourself to be a seller on this website. The country residency rules are very unfortunate, but only until that changes.
Alibaba
This is a potential gold mine, so it should be something you research. As opposed to AliExpress, anyone can be a seller on Alibaba. This is especially true in case if you're a producer of any product. And in recent years, there has been a surge in small-time creators and DIYers who make stuff in their garages...
It's a good B2B sales platform, and most importantly it is the largest international trading market. Most people think about buying here and not selling, and that's exactly why you should think the opposite.
Bonanza
A good eBay alternative that is gaining momentum fast. The amount of buyers is still small in comparison, but the near-zero fees are well worth it. They even have a function to import your eBay listings into their system.
From the reports I found, normally you can expect to do about twenty times less business here than on eBay. On the other hand, there's only a 3.5% sales fee.
eBid
The promise here is you'll have a 0% fee for life. The website structure is very similar to eBay in that there are auctions and buy-it-now listings. You'll get up to 5 free storefronts, and a tool to import eBay listings. What's the catch? You'll have to pay an upfront fee of $50, and that's it.
I think this is a worthwhile platform to try out if you're already at least a little bit successful on eBay. And if you think that you'll profit more than $50 over the entire lifetime of your presence here, then it's worth it. They rely on Google shopping traffic to make sales happen. There's some risk here, but your maximum loss is capped.
uSell
This is a very curious one because it specialized in mobile phones and small electronics. The process works backward where buyers will create listings for how much they're willing to pay for a phone. If you accept their price, then you can make a sale right away.
This reminds me of Amazon back in the days when they only dealt with books. I see good potential for them to expand to other products in the future, and there's enough appeal in the seller having to do very little work.
Listia
I love the idea of this marketplace. Listia will charge you no fees at all because all transactions are handled with digital currency. When you sell your item you get that currency. When you bid on an auction, you'll be paying out of that same currency. So in a way, transactions are happening, and they all bypass real money exchanges. It's great for beginners.
In case you want to exchange your digital currency for real money, you'll have to give up 20%. This is not bad really, because you could always opt to get items instead, where this fee is not present.
iOffer
This is a kind of an online flea market and in some ways similar to eBay buy-it-now listings. Buyers are allowed to send offers too. The fee structure varies between 5% and 10%. The great thing is, you can set up your account and create listings for free.
This marketplace has very little buyer protection, but with the use of PayPal and seller/buyer ratings, you can minimize risk - and this is a lot like what eBay was like 20 years ago. Overall there are over a million users here, and this makes it a place worth checking out.
Conclusion
As you can see, there's no shortage of online marketplaces where you can start selling very quickly. Of course, there are thousands more, but I try to stay only with the ones that have a good amount of buyers too. Please use the comment section below if you want to share another one that's worthy to be listed.
It's also great to find some places that are free like Listia or eBid and Craigslist. I take comfort in this, and maybe one day the big players like eBay and Amazon will decide to lower their rates to something more bearable.
Marketplace opinion?
Hi Mark!
Not sure when you wrote this page, bc i noticed there's no mention of poshmark or mercari, and i was wondering what you think of those sites overall?
Re: Marketplace opinion?
Hi Ashley,
Actually, this article is fairly new ;)
Thanks for pointing out Poshmark.com and Marcari.com --- these look like good ones too, and I missed them because I'm not so much in the Clothing / Style space.
If I had to choose from the two, I'd go with Poshmark, it looks like there are more buyers on this one.
Cheers!