The Internet has changed drastically over the past two years, and as things change, so do the six most used platforms to buy and sell products. A few years ago, there were only eBay, Amazon, Craigslist and a handful of other smaller sites that people actively used to shop and sell things on. Nowadays there are hundreds of sites, including some that deal in specialized market niches. This, in turn, forces buyers and sellers to adapt to each others’ preferences and demands for use of their products and services.
Platforms such as Amazon and eBay now account for well over half of all online purchases. These two giants have become the go-to places for buying and selling virtually anything under the sun. The sheer number of buyers and sellers on these sites is staggering. It would take many pages to write about all the niches and sub-niches that buyers go to for their shopping needs. So we’ll stick to the big six for our discussion.
The six most used sites to buy and sell products are: eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, Shopzilla, JVZoo and The Specialty Store. These six giants account for more than half of all online purchases. At least half of those purchases are done through eBay. eBay is the one with the largest marketplace and the most successful auction site, so naturally it is the one we will focus on here.
The first thing you need to understand about eBay is how auctions work. Anyone can start an auction. Once you’ve sold one item, then you can start a new auction. The process goes like this:
Product Owner: You create a product and register it on eBay as an available product. When a customer searches for something similar to your product through Google or Yahoo, eBay will search your listing to see if it’s already been sold. If it has then you win!
The eBay website has a page showing recent completed auctions and you can access this information from the drop down menu at the top of the page. The listings also tell you which sellers bid on a particular product – sometimes it can be very useful to take a look and see if a seller is particularly motivated to sell it. Once the bidding is on, you can then begin to bid against other bidders for the product.
Product Owner: This is where the magic happens. Once you have the product registered on eBay as available, it’s up to you to find buyers. It may be that there are hundreds of eager buyers searching for the same product but unless you have targeted the audience to whom it is relevant, you are likely to find it very difficult to sell it. Product owners register on eBay as buyers and start looking for sellers that have the product listed as available, they then place their bids depending on what the current price is and whether they like what they see.
In summary, there are six most used platforms to buy and sell products on eBay. Although these are all well known, many people are not aware of the fact that there are over 200 other listing types on eBay. So when you come across a product you would like to bid on, you do not need to worry that someone else might have already bid. You can sit back and wait for your turn to be chosen as the highest bidder. With such a wide choice of listing types, you can really be assured that you are always in with a chance of making a sale.
