UK’s eBid auction site launches U.S. version
With a different deal for sellers and new payment options for buyers, London-based eBid Ltd.’s eBid.net launched its U.S. version this week and expects to quickly build a major presence in here in the online auction market, CEO Gary Sewell says. “Within six months, we hope to surpass Overstock Auctions,” he tells InternetRetailer.com.
EBid started in the UK in 1999, when Sewell and his partners decided to replicate what eBay had started in the U.S. But when Yahoo closed its UK auction business in 2002, eBid changed its operating model to eliminate listing fees – copying what had been Yahoo’s model. Yahoo sellers were used to not paying fees, so we dropped our listing fees and ex-Yahoo users came to our site,” Sewell says.
EBid’s fee structure has helped it grow to more than 200,000 auctions daily in the UK, and it expects to reach 500,000 auctions within the first year in the U.S., Sewell says. EBid gets about 25,000 unique visitors per day in the UK, where it processes about 250,000 page impressions per day, he adds. Although eBid began piloting its U.S. site several weeks ago, it has yet to release any traffic figures.
While eBid charges no listing fees, it charges a 2% final value fee based on an auction’s final selling price. It also offers sellers the option of paying an annual membership fee of $79.99 in lieu of paying final value fees. By comparison, eBay charges listing fees ranging from 25 cents to $4.80, plus other fees including a final value fee starting at about 5%. In its recent third-quarter report, eBay said it had 68 million active users, including buyers and sellers, over the previous 12 months.
EBid’s payment system, PPPay.com provides a service similar to eBay’s PayPal, which accepts payments from auction buyers through credit cards or other vehicles and then pays the seller. Under this arrangement, buyers receive their goods after the seller has received payment.
But PPPay.com also offers an escrow service, which doesn’t release a buyer’s funds to the seller until after the buyer receives what she ordered. The buyer has 24 hours to approve the received goods and instruct PPPay.com to issue the payment. If a buyer doesn’t contact PPPay.com within 24 hours, PPPay.com proceeds with the payment.
Sewell is promoting eBid in the U.S. through a search engine marketing campaign that includes 20,000 keywords in Google and 5,000 in Yahoo, but eBid also expects to grow through word-of-mouth and a registration incentive program, he says. Under the incentive program, users who get friends to register on eBid receive credits that can be used to bid on auctions.
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