Uk Online Auction Sites

If you mention online auctions to most people the first name that comes to mind is eBay. This is not really surprising when you consider that eBay is the largest online auction site with over 233 million active users worldwide. In the UK eBay.co.uk is well established as the leading online auction site.

Ebay.co.uk was launched in October 1999 with offices above a shop in London. Currently eBay has 14 million registered users and can have as many as 10 million items listed for sale at any one time. EBay has given many individuals and small businesses the opportunity to establish themselves as online retailers. Currently eBay estimate that there are around 178,000 people who use eBay as their primary or second source of income.

However, eBay.co.uk is not the only UK based online auction, the second largest auction site is CQout (pronounced seek you out). This site usually has around 700,000 listing running at any one time. Unlike most other auction sites CQout does charge a small registration fee when you register but does not charge a listing fee. There is a charge of 1.5% on the final sale value which is considerably cheaper than most of the other online auction sites. CQout is a totally British run operation which was launched in December 1999.

eBid auctions was launched over 10 years ago in the UK. Now it has also expanded its operation into the USA. You can list items for free and use the list until sold feature. A final valuation fee of 3% I normally charged but it is possible to upgrade your account to seller+ for a price and then you do not pay any final fees. There are charges for additional items such as gallery or featured. There is no doubt that eBid is a cheaper option than eBay however, it lacks the quantity of bidders of the larger site. Quite a few eBay sellers have moved over to eBid in the last 12 months which must say something.

Some of the small UK online auction sites that are worth taking a look at are One Way United Kingdom, Auction1.co.uk and 121bid.com. There are some sellers who prefer to use these well less known sites but they all suffer from the problem of not being able to attract enough buyers or sellers to make them viable alternatives to the larger online sites.

There are a selection of other smaller and specialist online uk based auction sites but they seem to come and go very quickly. Two of the bigger UK online auction sites that have gone out of business are QXL and Tazbar. The fact that eBay are themselves moving more to fixed priced items and away from the auction format might suggest that the online auctions sites are beginning to lose favour with the public.

By: David Bromley

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