I have spent over 100 hours looking for viable alternatives to selling
computer stuff. Vintage does not have its own place. Bonanza.com is gaining
popularity, but it is not really IT or electronics oriented. Pricewatch.com
and similar sites only deal in reasonably current equipment. VCF does have a
Craigslist is the one big eBay alternative. eBay hates craigslist, and
wants it dead. I think a disgruntled employee sold his shares of CL to
eBay a while ago, so eBay owns a portion of CL and tries to make life hell
for them. eBay started Kijiji.com to try to take away marketshare from CL
but it didn't go super far.
On one hand eBay has to make money hand over fist. On the other, the sites
are full of disputes between buyers and sellres. People who don't know
what they are doing probably get taken often, people things by accident
then want to back out, people buy things then try to say they didn't work
and return other items, etc. Scammers galore.
Once eBay owned paypal they could leverage that to help clear up the
scamming versus the old days of money orders I guess.
I don't know what would happen if you had a successful auction site using
paypal. Paypal might get annoyed by all of the fraud issues and try to ban
use, and moving to something like stripe or some direct ACH solution might
be a mess.
I'd love to see an ebay competitor tho.
I have my Cray system listed on eBay, but I really have no intention of
selling it through there. I just want someone who is interested to contact
me via eBay and we can work it out around it.
The stuff I sell on eBay is always stuff I don't care what the outcome is,
I can't sell at cost or low margin and not mentally squirm.
On the flip side, I've bought stuff I'd never find anywhere else through
ebay, be it computers, computer parts, arcade parts, scuba diving stuff
whatever.... It's been a valuable resource over the years. They just need
to lower their damn prices and stop taking fees on shipping.
PS - Anyone have an Oberheim Matrix 6, 6R or 1000 for sale?
--
Ethan O'Toole
