Oztion vs Ebay
I’ve been a member of ebay since January 2001!
I’m finding myself joining the chorus of people getting a little disgruntled about them. The fees used to be nice and trivial, but now they’re starting to get significant. The latest move to force everyone to use paypal has raised some eyebrows. The tipping point for me has been a change in the selling models.
It used to be, and I think it still is on the USA site, that you could run an auction and place a ‘BuyItNow’ price as a sort of carrot to bidders who didn’t want to miss out or bother with the bidding. I rarely use it, but tried to a couple of days ago and they’ve changed it such that as soon as anyone places a bid then the BuyNow price disappears. I wasn’t aware of this change and placed my ad then wondered what happened to the buynow. I got someone on “LiveHelp” but I couldn’t get them to make any comment at all on this change so I wound up canceling the auction.
I figured I’d try Oztion.com.au – the aussie alternative. It wasn’t too hard to get registered; although I had to cough up $10 for ‘initial credit’ I was up inside 15 minutes. The ads are free there’s a Final Value Fee. All the ebay functionality is there so I listed.
I host the images at this site, so I get to see the level of interest. Three days later I’m a little appalled. Two or three people have seen the ad; on ebay that would be around 40 or 50.
Most items on Oztion are BuyNow. There are very few auctions. No doubt because auctions don’t really present good value to sellers if there is only one buyer.
Nonetheless I’ll stick with them for a bit longer. I dropped the price of the item and changed to an auction with a high, but good value, initial bid. See how we go. Hope I don’t have to go back to ebay to get rid of the thing.
http://www.oztion.com.au/buy/auction.aspx?itemid=4180255
One thing of note: oztion had a little facebook link. It posted the listing to my facebook “Feed” I’ve had about 10-15 hits from the feed… vastly more than the oztion site itself. Just curious friends, however, rather than genuine buyers.
John is a freelance programmer living in Sydney Australia. He blogs whatever takes his fancy; computing tips, travel letters, and random stuff from his life. He does it primarily to learn and demonstrate the running of a website.
The OZtion site is appalling. You never get sales over there, I had an item listed, it was brand new, I started the auction less than what I paid retail. Knowing when bids come in, I’ll make that money back, and if not, oh well, I wanted to sell the item. It happened to be a Nintendo Wii game. I was charging something like $60 start bid, this was mario galaxy by the way, not an unpopular game, and it had been released for 2 weeks in stores. A buyer emailed me saying they were interested in the item but didn’t want to pay $60, they said “if you wanna sell it, I’ll pay no more than $25 (including postage in that $25). So you can put a buy it now price of $25? I think very reasonable. If you want a sale you are charging too much for that game”. I basically wrote back saying I think your very mistaken, go look in Target at this games price brand new. Its worth a lot more than $25, I’m very sorry but I will not go lower than $60, I paid $99.95 for it” I took the listing off p*ssed off at the cheek of this person.
Then if THAT ain’t dumb enough, I bought an item just under $500. I received an item that was absolutely useless to me. I purchased the item when the seller had good feedback, and was going to pay on my payday which was 4 days away. Well, I noticed neg feedback appearing on this sellers name, and told OZtion. I was told to still pay in case the seller is genuine, and maybe has had some “bad” buyers. Stupidly I paid, not wanting to get a negative feedback. I received my goods weeks and weeks later, to find its just junk. Not as advertised at all. I told the police because I ain’t letting almost $500 go to some BS artist. Oztion were upset the police were told all because they are just as greedy as the other site (eBay) they wanted the fees from this seller. They did bugger all to help me and any others who been ripped off.
Oh also, the forums, They are the WORST. If you think the items are a load of 2nd hand, overpriced items, the forums will definitely put you off. Just a bunch of morons posting about silly things.
OZTION is possibly the worst site I have ever had the displeasure in stumbling upon.
There is no buyer protection there from Paypal as they have a very different deal going on as opposed to eBay.
I feel the ‘free to list’ factor is the sites downfall as it has seemed to of bred this feral membership base who control the ‘out-of-control’ (self moderated) forums.
Certain members get away with murder, degrading opposition sellers and buyers who do not pay within’ seconds. You will see these same people posting the same things day and night without respite and seemingly getting away with whatever they like while the inept Administration turns a blind eye in the same way the turn a blind eye to the thousands of counterfeit items on sale there.
Mention ‘free’ to certain demographics and all hell breaks loose.
Here the have a great platform for a decent (albeit little brother to the real deal eBay) business site but is all undone by the ferocious forum nazi’s who run the site and will eventually be it’s downfall.
Every second post on the ‘hundreds’ of forums is about non-paying-buyers which leaves the sites registration policy the laughing stock of all auction sites, and or fake items being sold, but never to be outdone by the thousands apon thousands of threads started complaining about NO Sales.
For amusement purposes, venture into the Family or Health discussion forums where these many benefit sapping lay-abouts bare their most personal details totally oblivious to the outside world looking in.
Yes, the site is free to list, but if you value your time, then you are simply losing money by even joining such a pitiful excuse for a plausible business.
PS. so how are your sales going there John? any chance of an update?
@johnno
Don’t hold back now, tell us how you really feel
Yep there was an update posted Oztion option opted-out. It sold on ebay pretty quickly. That $10 to oztion is already assigned to the ‘unrecoverable funds’ account.
Well if be putting off by purchasing items on OZtion which are never received, filing all the complaints, and never getting your money back and no help from Admin, they still let the Seller go on Selling isn’t enough then go to their forums where a specific group constanty take other members apart, put them down, vilify them, and when members have the courage to stand up against rigged competitions and Sellers who practice not sending the goods ban together and complain to admin and get them suspended well life on OZtion is a market place with gutter values.
A site as many have stated could be excellent value – but unfortunately floats on no values and decent people don’t stay around for long.
We have just closed all our accounts with Oztion. In recent times they have decided to become a platform for advertising revenue, see the pop-ups on every site. Now the only way they can attract these funds is by having a large membership. Well like a lot of others we are sad that Oztion is no longer a Auction site , rather just a fund raiser for the needy and greedy.
Al.