Pros of Amazon over Ebay
1) Amazon tells you how much you'll be paid for shipping, whereas Ebay makes you do the calculations yourself. This is time consuming and complex and involves you having to weigh and measure the items at home. By the time you get to the post office to mail the items, you'll most likely find that you either over or underestimated the delivery costs.
2) With Amazon, "sold' means "sold'. Once your item is declared sold, it means that the buyer has transferred the funds and payment has been processed.
With Ebay, a winning bidder does not necessarily translate into a paying customer. "Sold' on Ebay means that someone has offered you a price for your item. But then you have to request payment and wait until the bidder actually pays you. This makes room for changes of heart, thereby wasting you an entire listing, fees and all. So whilst Ebay and Paypal have worked hard to win buyer confidence, they urgently need to take steps to win seller confidence too.
Conclusion
Both websites have pros and cons, and, as a seller your personal preferences will draw you to one site over the other.
Although Ebay has a longer list of pros, their great shortcoming is that they are still lacking in seller confidence. Buyers may bid all they want, but have no incentive to follow through with payment once they win. This, for the seller means less sales, no reliability, and much frustration. Furthermore, the seller may contact the buyer to seek payment, but waiting for the buyer to respond is the same torturous experience as waiting for your stuff to ever sell on Amazon. Some will argue that you might as well nurture your patience and go with Amazon, where you'll be frustrated as you wait, but at least if you do ever make a sale, you'll know that "sold' always means "sold.' And that can be worth all the pros of Ebay and more.
Having said that, your smartest option may be to list your items on both sites, so as to expose yourself to the greatest number of people, and benefit from all the pros, whilst taking the sting out of the cons.
Over all though, the two sites have worked over the years to
iron out the kinks and flush out the scammers. Today both Ebay and Amazon are
reliable platforms for selling goods and have enough customers and products
worldwide as a testament to their success.
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