Auction Business Frank Ross on 12 Oct 2006 06:54 pm
UBid Higher Standards than eBay
Everyone knows that eBay is certainly the 800 gorilla of online auctions, but I think other auction sites might be gaining some ground. Just for kicks, I googled ‘online auction’. As you might expect, eBay came up first in organics. But 2nd was UBid followed by Yahoo! Auctions. By the way, Overstock.Com which is commonly considered a contender to eBay was not the first page of SERPs for this term.
UBid is quite different than eBay in a lot of ways and seems to have gone after eBay’s apparent Achilles Heel - fraud. A lot of experts think that fraud is a large part of eBay’s acceptance problem in the minds of many buyers.
I don’t have a lot of experience on UBid, but I did go through the signup process.
The biggest difference there is that in order to sell on UBid, you must have a business license / resale ID. You must also provide 3 trade references (one of them can be your eBay user if you elect to do that). This means that unlike eBay - who let’s anyone sell if they have a bank account and credit card - only legitimate businesses can sell on UBid.
This alone may go a long ways in making buyers feel more confident about buying on UBid. If only they can get that message across to the online buyer community, eBay might have some actual competition.
– Frank Ross
on 28 Oct 2006 at 2:54 am 1.Common Sense E-Commerce - …contemporary e-commerce business with a small business slant » Followup On UBid said …
[…] Followup On UBid By Frank Ross It’s now been a few weeks since I posted a piece about UBid (Link Here). Since that time, I’ve had the chance to actually try selling on the site and for the most part am a bit disappointed. My disappointment stems from what I consider 2 rather serious shortcomings […]