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RE: The Fallacy of Ebay, Craigslist, Poshmark, etc.
Hey Geek. Ebay used to be great and a proper auction back in the early days. I am talking 20 years ago though. It has moved away from what it was to loads of little shops selling all sorts of junk at fairly high prices. I used to buy all sorts on there and remember buying a microwave for a third of the price retailing in the shops. There were few items with a buy now price and they were proper auctions where you outwitted others bidding. Then they introduced hidden bids that would only be triggered as the price rose. It changed as soon as they bought Pay Pal and tied up the sellers money for 30 days. They lost me when that happened.
I don't think I used it before they bought PayPal...but I have used it for quite a while. It always had the sort of difficulty I talked about in my post, where sellers had a chance of possibly seriously losing out, and a buyer getting something for some insanely low price. That's good for the buyer, but horrible for the seller. It's way worse now than it has ever been though. I would guess this is partially due to Amazon...but I have never sold on Amazon, so I didn't get into that.
There's always been this struggle to get items to sell on there, because there's a tendency for things to sell pretty low, plus most orders being single items, so the shipping price and ebay fees seriously cut into your profit. Now it's far easier to source things, at least it feels like it, but it seems like less people are checking it, in relation to the other sellers.
I have only sold a few things and stopped when Pay Pal came on board. I suppose it depends what you are selling. I know someone selling on Amazon now and they find it far easier and are doing really well. With Amazon they have a formula that works out your profit and they handle the distribution. It doesn't matter what distribution warehouse it is in as they build in delivery. The beauty is you can test items without having the stock to see what the demand is first. Out of stocks are allowed for new users in the beginning , but count against you once the item is stocked and they run out.