My Ebay Experiment....

From experience, ebay is the safest site,there fees are not that bad compared to amazon, and the paypal yes it's another fee but you get your money right away .I sold on amazon a camera around the holidays,my money was stuck with amazon for 55 days till I had to threaten to call the BBB and file a lawsuit.I've been selling on and off on ebay for 4 years now, it's good, but you have to look at it that way, it's a big big mall with a lot of stores and sellers, buuyers will take time to see you and sometimes they can't,but don't take it personnally, it' commerce that is how it goes.
I have to say though that my income was very predictable with avon, I am an avon rep from home also, but with ebay, you'll just never know
Good luck....

You can do all the experimenting you want, but you won't get me to stray from Ebay. I have been there over six years and have a store now. The fees are very reasonable if you have a store because you become a committed partner with them. In fact right now anyone can list anything for 20 cents, how can you consider that high? Remember getting 100,000 people a day to your ad is worth something.

I personally haven't bought from any other auction site, but my sister did. Not only did she not receive her product, but there was really no course of action to take. At least at Ebay you get the satisfaction of being able to comment on the seller either good or bad. And you have the ability to check up on the seller's reputation on the site my sister went through she just lost her money.

You gave me an idea: how about just purchasing loads of stuff that are dirt cheap and so you get loads of positive rating.
Come to think about it, what do you get out of positive rating on eBay?

the problem with trying different sites is that they could be a scam and could be unsafe. there is always a risk when you give your card details away, but the mroe well known the site is, the less chance of you being scammed.
the experiment does sound good, its quite likely you will get a lot of wrong items or delays though lol.

I don't like the idea of auction sites, I prefer to use Amazon or other dedicated retail channels with their own dedicated stock/suppliers, probably because of all the fraud and stuff you hear of round the net.

I don't know of any auction sites that are better than ebay. I buy A LOT of stuff on Ebay. I've bought over 200 items easily just in the year and a half that I have lived in ND and out of all of my transactions, only one of them was even remotely bad. I had a problem with a seller not shipping the item in a very timely fashion. Every time I emailed her she responded quickly saying it would be in the mail soon. I got it almost a month after I paid for it. But I did recieve the item eventually. And as I stated before, that was the only problem I have ever had with them.

I have done quite a lot of purchasing through Ebay and also sold off quite a few unwanted prize wins ..

To date I have never had a problem .. all the people I have sent items to have been happy .. and all the items I have bought have been just as described ..

I've only had one problem and that was an item that was sent from Australia which unfortunately got broken in the post .. it was replaced immediately by the seller ..

I am very happy with the way Ebay works .. although I am not happy about the hand over fist charges you have to pay ..

overstock auctions are not too bad but still small some say ubid but never been on it

I don't know of any one that works out better for sellers due to the wide popularity of ebay and how it is better known. I buy and sell on ebay and the fees to get quite high and I tried to do without excepting paypal but so many people wish to pay that way and it is terrible that it costs me for them to use it. I feel it should be the other way around. I ask as much as possible for money orders instead but no one wants to do it. When i started with ebay the fee to list an item was a lot lower. Now I watch very closely for when they have a deal on listing or gallery photo. It's so sad that I have to pay 35 cents just in order to put a little photo up and that is for any starting price. I can't see too many little things due to this and a lot of people make up for the fees by charging more shipping.