Ex-eBay sellers offer bang for your buck

Daniel Long | Apr 14, 2008 2:36 PM
A rogue group of ex-power sellers have broken away from the eBay mothership and launched their own auction site. The best bit? No listing fees.
Bang4bucks.com.au was conceived with the help and input of over 25 core power sellers, and claims its focus on being fully "Australian" will give it an advantage over eBay.

The site officially launches at the start of next month, and only Australian-sold products are available on the site. "We wanted to create a website that would be truly Australian", said co-founder Gary Breit. "With all Australian products, not ones from the USA or NZ. We want our buyers to buy Australian. It’s plain and simple."

Even though Breit came from a varied background in sales and marketing, he wasn’t a regular eBay seller. The impetus for the site was born from his frustrations trying to source products for sale that were not being hosted in far off countries, who offer cheap auction prices to encourage eBay bidders, but with high freight costs. “I didn’t want to go through thousands of overseas products just to find a product available here”, Breit told us.

Bang4Bucks representatives argue that because eBay is based overseas, it can be hard for customers to follow up complaints with Australian local authorities. Breit’s top priority was to design an all-local site with local rules, regulated by Australian law.

Bang4bucks is also aiming to keep a tight grip on who signs up, adding a key verification system that will separate buyers and sellers into distinct separate categories upon sign up. Buyers will not be able to sell unless they are verified to do so.

A more developed complaints and feedback system is also being unveiled, with one of the key differences to eBay being that customers will not be able to email the seller directly. All email correspondence will be displayed on the seller's auction webpage. This is to ensure that no funny business is going on behind the scenes.

The site is also gearing up for former eBay users, with Bang4bucks pre-optimised to handle eBay templates and listings. "Crazy Sunday auctions" is also a special feature on the website where short listed impulse-buy auctions will be encouraged only on Sundays to make it easier for sellers to offload stock.

Breit is obviously hoping to pickup disgruntled eBay users, telling us that, “there are a lot of disillusioned people out there at the moment”.

The site's CEO, Debbie Williams, is an eBay power seller and has made her living off eBay for the last number of years. She arrived at Bang4bucks with a pedigree background in the politics of eBay buying and selling. She was part of a strong and loyal group of eBay power sellers known as "Auspowersellars" who regularly met to discuss their businesses.

"After a while, it was getting harder and harder to adapt to these changes", Williams told us. That's when Williams and her group of power sellers banded together and started to sow the seed for their auction alternative.

The site hasn’t even launched yet and things are already heating up in the auction marketplace.

"In the last twenty-four hours, we've had an extra 120 sellers sign up with the site. And that's just from word of mouth from seller to seller." That might have something to do with the recent announcement by eBay, stipulating they are only going to accept PayPal as the sole method of payment, which means more fees and less profit for some sellers, argues Williams. "50% of my customers pay on direct bank balance" she said. The Bang4Bucks site will offer all payment types, including PayPal.

One of the other big differences is fees. eBay charges listing fees and this can be very expensive for power sellers, even when the inventory stock is not selling. However, Bang4bucks will only charge fees if an item is sold based on a 2.00 – 3.75% sliding scale, depending on the overall value of the sale.

Bang4bucks will also have live 24/7 customer support, something that Williams hopes will inspire buyer and seller confidence. Because it costs nothing for sellers to list on her website, Williams is hoping it will be very easy for eBay sellers to dual list on both websites at no further cost.

In the first month, Williams said she hoped for at least 500 sellers to be listing with Bang4Bucks and more than 5000 buyers. As for Williams remaining an eBay disciple? "I have full confidence that my customers will follow and buy from the new site. I'm prepared to forgo income to build the new site. I hope to completely pull away within a week of the site opening".