A Seller's Critique

In the interest of full disclosure, you can take this review with a grain of salt if you want to, because I haven’t tried selling on this site since 2016 (and that was the third time, after giving it a go back in 2010, and again in 2014), but this is one of those marketplaces where nothing seems to change all that much—and all available evidence seems to corroborate that statement for 2019. SITE/NAVIGATION  eBid's landing page. The site’s design is pretty decent and straightforward, though it still feels pretty antiquated. It was no doubt created to steal some of the success from eBay, but you have to give it credit for being one of the first (eBid launched in the UK way back in 1998, before coming to the U.S. in the early 2000s); how is it, then, that no one has heard of it? That’s just one of the myriad of problems affecting this site, but we’ll have plenty of time to get more in-depth with its problems later on. The front page is loaded with information tou

Pirate Ship is a website that purports to allow deep USPS discounts—the same discounts you can get through paid programs like Endicia—without an added fee of any kind, beyond the cost of the postage. They even take it a step further by offering one that isn't included in other free platforms (at least, not that I'm aware of): Priority Mail Cubic, which can knock a few cents off of qualifying Priority Mail shipments. But is it just another case of “too good to be true”, or is it actually as useful as it claims to be? Let's delve in to the details and find out!  SITE/NAVIGATION Pirate Ship's simple navigational bar The site is rather bare-bones (pun honestly not intended; I promise there are no more pirate references the rest of the way), with all of the available options off to the left, via a navigation bar. Recent shipments are automatically placed on the front page once you sign in, so accessing them is a breeze. Since Pirate Ship just focuses on one th

DISCLAIMER: Based on my love for this app, which I feel should be more well-known, I did reach out to the developer, and briefly assisted with creating the Classadlister support forums; I was neither paid nor reimbursed in any way for my time and NONE of this review was influenced by this experience. In fact, it was the other way around—my love for the app lead me to want to assist in any way I could. --- Since I only sell part-time, I initially figured that I didn’t need to invest in anything to help me post and manage my inventory. After all, I tended to only get a handful of items every month, or so, and never saw a point to streamlining any of that. For a little while, when I was only posting to one or two different sites, that theory held up fairly well. Then I started to expand my reach to as many marketplaces as I could handle, and that’s when the reality of my situation started to set in: I needed help. Posting the same things over and over, manually to multipl

Will this be the death blow for the once formidable app? (Credit: Imgur) In my initial review of Mercari, I noted that the shipping rates are a big part of what makes the marketplace work, assuming you know how best to take advantage of them. I suppose that original theory still works, but it's going to take a little more strategic planning than it did in the past, as Mercari has unleashed another round of shipping markups, which went into effect on February 25th. Not a big deal, or just a part of doing business, you may be thinking? After all, shipping rates across all carriers just went up last month, so the timing of this certainly makes sense. However, it was less than a year ago (April, 2018) that the rates last went up, so for them to go up again--by as much as 52% in some categories--makes Mercari seem less and less like a viable long-term solution for many sellers. Let's analyze these over the previous year's increases, shall we? April, 2018 price i

Really, what’s the point of even reviewing the world’s biggest auction site? Certainly a part-time seller like me can’t bring anything new to the table that millions of other reviews haven’t already mentioned. And that much is certainly true. Still, it’s a decent-sized part of my selling plan, as it is with millions of other sellers, and so I feel it should be included for the sake of completeness, if nothing else. SITE/NAVIGATION eBay's main landing page for me...and this is truncated. eBay’s home page is incredibly cluttered, though that seems to be the norm now, as online stores try to shove as many potential deals in your face as possible, right from the get-go. And, like everything else these days, the main page is all suited towards your likes and interests, using your search history and "watch list" items against you, in a desperate ploy to get you to buy something. I suppose it's an effective strategy, given the fact that every major site seem