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Amazon vs ebay
 

Something been playing on my mind lately, I have 2 real Amazon accounts, and 2 years ago they were thriving, now it seems that there is more competition on Amazon.
I think they made it easier for sellers to get ungated, I had to jump through fire hoops 8 years ago.

That said ebay still seems to get have rapid traffic and sales.

I was thinking of opening a shopify website and sell direct, but I always get Trading Standards sniffing around, when I have a direct website.
With ebay never had an issue.

What's your thoughts on this guys???

Re: Amazon vs ebay
 

My take:

Amazon has 20x the traffic of eBay and sells probably 100x more volume. But it's more challenging to sell there because Amazon allows the best performing sellers to dominate a niche, where eBay on the other hand will purposely shuffle their search results so that no seller ever does that. That, along with the fact that you're almost always competing against Amazon themselves (who will purposely put you out of business if they feel they'll gain an edge) makes it hard for all but the most professional type of sellers on Amazon. Amazon doesn't even want to work with smaller distributors or suppliers anymore.

eBay is still trying to brand themselves as a platform that anybody can get on and do well selling on. Amazon has been doing the opposite.

I don't know what type of items you sell but a standalone store didn't work very well for me. It may be different if you sell something specialized. I think in my category it would have had a chance 10 years ago before everybody opened the Amazon app on their phone by default to look for products.

Re: Amazon vs ebay
 

Diet pills/Herbal supplements is what I sell. I think with a stand alone site, you can get the upper hand, as most of the sellers on there are charging 5 times as much as I sell my item for.

Re: Amazon vs ebay
 

I used to run a shopify site with a product I was selling previously in mass volume on Ebay and Amazon. I mainly used it to avoid selling fees with repeat customers.

Every Ebay and Amazon order I sent I would include a flyer for my direct site offering free delivery with the included discount code.