Amazon Tops Ebay for Selling Old Books, Videos, Games

I have been a fan of Ebay for years as it is a great way to get rid of stuff I don't want anymore and find new stuff I do want, but I have just recently learned the joy of selling on Amazon.

Now, unless it's clothes or something I can't sell on Amazon, Ebay has gone the way of the dinosaurs.

To be honest, Amazon isn't for everyone. The basic fees they charge are higher than Ebay fees and I have no control over what I charge for shipping. That means I occasionally pay more to ship an item than the fee Amazon charged and gave me a percentage of for shipping, but I've decided to live with it.

The reality is that Amazon eliminates the guesswork. If I list an item for sale of Ebay, I have to wait and see what it sells for. Auctions are market driven and if the market is slow the week I post an item, well, my sale is probably going to happen at a lower price or not at all.

And, Ebay has a listing fee. If the item sells or not, I pay at least a few cents just to use their service.

These are the points where Amazon excels. There is no initial listing fee with Amazon and the listing stays up for 60 days. Amazon takes a fee per item and a percentage of the total sale price once it sells, but if the item doesn't sell, I'm not out money.

Also, Amazon let's me set the price. So, if I know that my out of print collector's edition of Laws of Night sells for about $95, I can list it for that much. Or, being the saleswoman that I am, I can list it for $90 and undercut the competition. I did and it sold in 24 hours.

That's another perk of Amazon. There is no minimum auction timeframe. Once an item is listed, it can sell as soon as someone who wants to buy it finds it.

Yet another perk of Amazon is the way items are listed. Because I am selling a large volume of books, I am very thrilled with the idea that I can list items by ISBN or UPC code. That means Amazon is likely to already have an image of the product in it's data base and I don't have to spend time writing up a detailed description of a book. It meant that I was able to list 50 different books in the course of about an hour, not something I could even think about doing on Ebay.

Amazon also provides sellers with a list of the current prices of the item they are listing. This is the same listing the buyer sees when they look up an item. So, it may say, "4 new items from $16.05 and 23 used items from $10".

This service is perhaps the most valuable of all Amazon's services for buyers. It means I do not have to spend hours looking up the item I want to sell, seeing what other prices it is listed at and in what condition. Again, the time it saves me is enormous. And, it gives me the opportunity to undercut the competition if I want to sell quickly, or maximize my profit if I don't mind waiting a little longer for the sale.

There are downsides to Amazon. They take a much bigger chunk of the sale price than Ebay does, but at least for me, the difference in sale price makes it worth it.

And, as a marketplace seller, if Amazon does not already have the basic information on an item, you can't list it. For me, it's meant that about 5 of the older, out of print books and games I wanted to sell can't be listed there. For those, I'll go back to Ebay, but for everything else, look for my sales on Amazon.