The best of the rest ahead of eBay 4th Quarter results

Today is the day analysts are waiting with bated breath for the close of markets and for eBay to release it's fourth quarter results. What we weren't expecting is analysis of the competition along with their current performance but perversely they've obliged - or at least Wagglepop have!

Current Alexa Traffic Rank after just eight months in operation is currently at 47,303,which puts us on par with or ahead of most other independent alternative online auction sites at this time and ahead of all internal projections. We average roughly 2,000 unique sales per week, and currently have 140,000+ listings available in a variety of formats for bid or purchase.

So 2,000 unique sales a week, or about 8,000 a month, just how many sellers (in eBay terms) does that equate to? Taking a medium volume seller with perhaps 500 transactions a month that means Wagglepop currently support just sixteen full time sellers. Contrasted to eBay though they would have to list 8,000 listings each, and I don't know too many sellers who would happily run that many concurrent listings for a 1.43% sell through, it is astoundingly poor! In reality 500 transactions a month would need to be a reasonable value to sustain a seller, so it's likely Wagglepop can support less than sixteen sellers.

They go on to compare Alexa traffic rankings with other auction sites, comparing those in the UK (with the exception of eBay and Amazon who are a quantum leap ahead) and there's no great encouragement. Tazbar and QXL don't have significantly more traffic, and eBid is about double, certainly not far enough ahead to suggest they have much greater sell through rate. Only eBid has three times the listings of Wagglepop with Tazbar about level and QXL trailing with a quarter the number.



The best that can be said for any of these sites is that if you have unlimited stock it won't do you any harm by listing it and forgetting it - especially on those sites with no listing fees. None of them appear to attract the traffic to sustain a full time seller at this stage. They just don't have the buyers required to give the sell though rates regardless how impressive the number of listings these fledgling sites manage to attract may be.

eBay gives other sites a good handbagging

Online auction sellers fall generally into one of two camps: those who like eBay, and those who hate Feebay with a passion. Those of us in the first camp - and I'm happy to stand up and be counted here - sometimes make the observation that we go where the buyers are, and the buyers are all still on eBay. The response to that is generally that we don't know what we're talking about.

Now Trevor Ginn, head of Auctioning4U, has given us some real listings to look at, and interesting looking they certainly are:

Over the last few months have sold many Harpers & Queen Brown Cowhide Briefcase Joyanatura so we decided to try idential listing on other auction sites. Over the period of the trial we have sold 17 for an average price of £27 (ranging from £12.50 to £63) on eBay. Data for the other sites is as follows:

• CQout: No Bid, 15 viewers
• eBid: No Bid, 6 viewers
• QXL: 1 Bid at 99p, 102 viewers
• Tazbar: No Bid, No Data

Admittedly, it's one product, but really, how conclusive can you get?

Scottish charity auctions looking good

Scotland on Sunday has an interesting crop of auctions in aid of Sightsavers on QXL. My brother in law's an MSP, so I'm rather tempted by the chance to tell the Scottish Parliament what to debate, though if anyone wants to get me a late Xmas pressie, I'd be very happy with Alexander McCall Smith, or Rebus, or the whisky...

Polish shines for QXL

eBay-competitor QXL has bought a 75% stake in Polish price comparison site Ceneo. QXL already runs a Polish auction site, Allegro, but Robert Dighero, QXL's acting chief executive, said that "This acquisition provides us with expertise in what is currently an underdeveloped area of the e-commerce market in Poland and the potential to develop this area in other geographic markets."

This is an interesting strategy: QXL's homepage lists Scandinavian and eastern European countries as their "principal operations", without even mentioning their UK and German sites, the two European countries where eBay is strongest. It seems that QXL are trying to position themselves to pick up business that eBay, with their unfortunate concentration on China, have missed.

Why you should concentrate your sales on eBay - facts and figures

According to Alexa.com the top ten most popular sites in the UK are made up of search (eg Google, Yahoo, MSN) and community sites (MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia). Only one ecommerce site appears in the top ten and this, unsurprisingly, is eBay.co.uk, sitting comfortably in position three. The top ten is pretty stable and the next highest ecommerce site is Amazon.co.uk, just missing out at eleventh most popular.

With facts such as one in three UK Internet users visiting eBay.co.uk at least once a month it's not surprising it's the most popular auction site for sellers and justifiably so as the competition just don't have the traffic. Whilst eBay performs consistently the alternative selling venues have varying fortunes.

Ebid saw an upturn in its traffic views in October which is likely attributable to the changes in Shop Inventory Format fees on the eBay site prompting sellers to try an alternative. Now in mid November this upturn has nosedived and looks more like a temporary blip then a permanent change of fortunes.

QXL jogs along with no great changes but with about forty visits per million browsers.

Tazbar, the new kid on the block, looks more hopeful but bear in mind it's early days. Having ambled along averaging ten views per million browsers it's skyrocketed to forty in the last month. (TV Advertising effect?) The real question is are all the views from sellers or do they have some buyers yet? Completed listing searches don't fill you with confidence.

All these sites pale into insignificance when eBay is thrown into the mix though. Alexa shows steady traffic, averaging some seven thousand views per million browsers confirming its status as the granddaddy of the auction sites. If you want to know where you're most likely to get sales put your money into eBay fees because the other sites added together don't even register as a blip on the horizon. If you do want an alternative your only hope as a serious seller right now is that your products fit Amazon's portfolio.

We often wonder what it would take for a serious contender to eBay, and the answer is traffic, and lots of it. Tempting promises of free listing fees simply serve to fill the site with items that eBay largely escapes except on cheap listing days. Sure it bumps up the number of listings on the site but then when a hard won buyer eventually arrives any quality goods are swamped by the dross. It doesn't matter how great a site looks, what counts is if a site can attract the buyers but currently only eBay is worth a serious seller concentrating on.

Is the marketplace big enough for a serious contender? Almost certainly yes and a monopoly is never healthy. Is there one out there? For the professional online sellers looking at return on time and investment the answer is not yet but maybe soon - only time will tell.