Bidstart + Sg, Will You Change Your Buying/Selling Habits?

With Stanley Gibbons purchasing bidStart and planning to take ebay head on in the new year, I thought it might be interesting to know how this will effect you.

Will you buy more often at bidStart and less often at ebay or Delcampe?

For sellers, will you move your store to bidStart?

Overall thoughts?

Declaration: I'm am a biased bidStart fan!

Regards,

Rod

I'll probably move over.
Currently an ebay fan, and try like the devil, to like Delcampe
but it remains klunky to me, prefer $ than euros,
and I find it hard to drill down for the specialised material I am after.

However Delcampe certainly has the goods if you can find it.
I dislike the trend to list single stamps at 30c etc
with shipping you are paying $4 for a standard stamp.

I'll wait and see. If Bidstart changes really dramatically, I might bother with it. As it is, I look in around once a year, and give up in disgust after 5 minutes.

I have an ebay feedback score of nearing 1000, and on Delcampe, somewhere below 20. I think that says it all, as far as those two are concerned. I've never found anything worth bidding on, let alone buying, on Bidstart.

Hi and a Warm Welcome to SCF. Always nice to see another Aussie on board.

You need to get rid of your link. You need to have 50 quality posts to do that.

I have looked at bid start but chose to remain on ebay for the time being.
ebay has the traffic, yes the fees are higher but that the cost of having a store on a busy street.
Bidstart seems to be the alley running behind main street.
I will see how bid start does over a year or so then take another look at it.

I only use bidstart to look for specific stamps, never to browse. Bidstart listing policies allow for an endless parade of kiloware-worthy single stamp listings. This makes browsing for deals painful at best. Until this changes, ebay is my site of choice.

I started my online stamp buying with bidStart but eventually migrated to ebay as I felt the selection was greater, the prices seemed lower, and there were far fewer ads.

I occasionally return to bidStart but generally only do so when I'm looking for something specific.

In that regard, I find it interesting to compare a seller's prices for those that list the same items on both sites. The other day I picked up a "buy it now" item on bidStart for 15% less than the buyer had it listed on ebay.

I find all the sellers on Bidstart as the same ones on ebay. Also I think there are more bargains to be found on ebay as you see more of the sellers that stumbled upon a collection at an estate sale or something along those lines. As with Bidstart it seems as if all the sellers are professional Stamp dealers and the asking price of some of the material reflects that.

Bidstart has a LONG way to go before it becomes serious competition to ebay. ebay's stamp auction is just a small piece of its revenue. Now, if Bidstart were to put in a better search engine and more sort options then I think it may have a chance of doing well against ebay. Did I mention advertising, you see ebay advertising at many places but I have never seen one for Bidstart. Like I said, it'll be a long time before Bidstart even gets close. JMHO.

Art

As a Brit, I was unfamiliar with bidStart until this thread. As a client of SG, I was surprised not to learn from them of their acquisition.

I had to try it out, so logged on to bidstart.co.uk and entered the search term of "Training". An excellent result showing nearly 24,000 items... 99.9% of which are "trains"! How do I just search for "training", for if I enter "training -train", I get zero results! Not a good start, for at least ebay will allow quotation marks around the word and then return the correct results.

I then looked at prices and see that I have been transferred to bidstart.com and everything is in dollars, yes OK with GBP below it, but in small type. Had there not been a dot co dot uk site, this would not have been an issue to me.

With so many specialised wants, it is like looking at old friends as the same old lots rejected on ebay keep turning-up in the results pages.

One good thing - they accept asterisks in the search term. (I spent forever changing all my saved searches on ebay when, with three days notice, they stopped allowing * in searches.)

More upStart than bidStart at this time for me, but I am prepared to give it a go in due course when some of the niggles have (hopefully) been resolved under SG's helm.

GLENN MORGAN

Glenn,

Try gooogle. If you put in "site:bidstart.com training stamps" you'll get all the stamps at bidstart that have the word training, but nothing with trains (at least in the top 100). You can replace bidstart.com with ebay.com and get the same results form ebay.

Gibbons' acquisition can be nothing but good news for ebay fans. It may force ebay to abandon some of their reprehensible policies and idiotic "features," as well as their overwhelming bias in favor of buyers.

I assume bidStart allows any type of payment, not just PayPal (correct me if I'm wrong). If Gibbons will maintain that very important policy, I will list some higher-priced items there and accept ONLY (no-nonsense) postal money orders in payment. With a suitable Start Bid, I am fully-protected price-wise, and while it may take longer, I'm willing to wait to get money orders as payment. And buyers can take it or leave it, it's time for Sellers to get the upper hand again.

That one issue, in my mind, is a huge PLUS for bidStart.

I have a small Bidstart store but only to sell my duplicates and things I run across I don't collect. I don't sell much, but I'm not in it to make a living. Anything I sell I use that money to buy items I collect. Now and then I find something on Bidstart I collect and buy it, but I admit I seem to find more of my collecting interests on ebay. I am hopeful Stanley Gibbons will bring more buyers and sellers to Bidstart. Right now I'm happy just being a stamp collector.

There are many, many people who agree with you on this issue, but I am not one of them.

Historically, dealers have always had the upper hand on collectors. ebay took away the power to horde and price fix and gave the buyers the upper hand ... and I contend that it saved philately.

While I agree that ebay may have burdensome policies, you could offset some of the listing and paypal costs in the price of your stamps ... and most of us are willing to pay it to avoid the hassle of buying, filling out, and mailing money orders at the expense of our time and money to save the seller a buck.


Henry Clay stated: "A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied".

Perhaps Bidstart will create policies that will make us both unhappy ...

Brian

I've linked my ebay and Bidstart accounts so when I list on ebay it automatically list the same item on bidstart. ebay is where I've gotten most of my Biz, but today I sent 12 covers to Swziterland (SIC) worth $66 dollars and tEbay this Month has done a $100

I didn't know you could link like that. And ebay goes along with this???

If an item sells, do you pay commission to both auctions? With the link in place, must buyers pay only with PayPal? I'd like to read a couple of paragraphs about the details.

As for too much trouble to get a money order, that's tough. I'm talking items over $100, up to $1000, shipped domestically so I can insure them properly. I've sold over 2300 lots and have a 100% perfect Feedback, I must be doing something right.

As I noted above, it's time for the Sellers to have the upper hand again, and the proper response to picky Buyers is "my way or the highway..." I might add I'm talking about one-of-a-kind postal history items, not $100 sets that everybody and his brother has.

On cheap lots, I'll put up with all kinds of nonsense to make a sale, because I have 000's of cheap lots to peddle. Expensive lots, I am firmly in charge.