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eBay Alternative Site: eCrater marketplace
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The many changes at eBay over the last few years have had buyers and sellers migrating to other sites to conduct their person to person ecommerce. One of those sites is eCrater (www.ecrater.com) also known as "The Moon" to its users.
eCrater was started in 2005 and its main appeal to sellers is that there are no fees, None. Nada. Zilch. You can pay fees to have homepage or higher search ranking exposure but the basic service has no insertion fees and no final value fees (FVF).
eCrater's cellular set up makes it seem less like a multi-seller site and more like having your own personal webstore. Once you enter a store on eCrater, unless you know where to look, it is hard to navigate back to the main site. Many sellers like this set up. It helps keeps the buyers in their store which increases the chance to make a sale. Communities at some eBay alternative sites are very socially oriented and that is the main appeal of those sites. At eCrater the opposite is true. The members attracted by The Moon are less vocal and more professional in their approach. They are there to do business, not exchange recipes and the bare bones, no nonsense set up of eCrater reflects this.
At eCrater you can not fancy up your listings with colorful backgrounds, cool fonts or dancing unicorn gifs. You upload the photos and type your description in plain black electrons. As Joe Friday would say "Just the facts".
The growth of the site is impressive. eCrater currently has over 1.6 million unique listings and keeps on growing steadily. The site has more than doubled in size over the last 12 months. The owner is very active and involved with policing the site behind the scenes. For its size, eCrater is one of the best at keeping fake items off of the site, keeping adult items in the appropriate categories and keeping duplicate listings from the same seller to a minimum. As a site grows, it is harder to keep track of every listing but eCrater has done as good a job as any in keeping it under control.
eCrater was also one of the first eBay Alternatives to integrate Google Checkout into their site in addition to offering Paypal.
One of the things I like best about eCrater is that the site receives good rankings on Google. These days, many buyers go to Google or Google Shopping to begin their shopping experience and the better exposure a site gets in Google, the increased opportunity for sales. No matter how good an alternative site is, if the buyers can't see you in Google, the sales will not happen.
One of the downsides to eCrater is inventory management. At sites that have an inventory management tool, when a sale is made the quantity is automatically deducted from the total onhand. At eCrater this has to be done manually after every sale, even if you only had one item to begin with. If you are not quick enough to adjust the inventory, you might end even selling the same item twice.
Another downside is the shipping calculator is complicated and takes awhile to set up. Twice a year the Post Office raises it's rates and twice a year eCrater sellers need to go through the long process of updating shipping fees.
Overall, based on the size of the site, it's track record, functions and search engine exposure, one can make a strong argument that eCrater is the best eBay alternative site out there.
This has been my experience with eCrater. I do not want anyone to take my word for anything I or anyone else says about any site. What you should do is open up a store as a test, list between 50 and 100 items to get used to the functions of the site and to see what you think. You should also moniter the your items to see how they show up in the search engines. Sales are not the only way to measure a site's worth. The real question to ask yourself is if a site is giving you an opportunity to make sales. Are the buyers exposed to your items?
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