Bidstart Sellers

Does anyone sell on bidstart? I'm wondering what the volume of buying is there and if it's worth taking the time to list duplicates.

For those who like to shop for individual stamps, it's a decent place to look.

Thanks!

I've never had any luck selling there. If you want to move product, ebay is the place.

Again, in my experience...BidStart offers attractive selling costs, but sales are almost non-existent. On the other hand, ebay is far more costlier, but does generate sales.

I sell on BidStart and ebay. My sales on BidStart are generally 5% or less of ebay sales. Store items can be imported from ebay to BidStart, so there is no additional listing work required for BidStart.

Better sales on ebay

As a buyer I can tell you that, although I have bought at both sites, I buy far more at ebay simply because the turnover of items offered is so much higher, so I look at ebay every day while I go to bidstart maybe once a week.

SG killed bidstart... it was on its way to being much more viable than it is.

It might just be the stamps I'm buying, but to me the prices on bidStart seem to have gone up in the past few months, enough to make me go back to ebay. That's from one buyer's point of view.


-IBFS

Thanks all for the comments. Sort of what I was afraid of.

I think the bidstart sellers that do well (if indeed there are any) are the ones that just have massive amounts - tens of thousands - of listings. I do shop on bidstart and probably place a couple orders a month there. I almost invariably am searching for some cheap single(s) that aren't on ebay individually, but I go with the intention of ordering several of them and placing at least a $20 order or more from the same seller. So, when I find that first stamp I'm looking for, I check out the seller's other offerings and find more stamps to buy from them. If they don't have much that I want, I'll check another seller that has that stamp and then look through their listings, lather, rinse, repeat. The seller that has a zillion listings is probably going to have the most stamps that I want and will probably get my order. I'm sure a lot of other buyers do the same thing for the cheap singles.

Artful, eggzackly the way I use bidStart and Stamps2go. I would say, though, that it need not be a seller who has zillions of stamps overall. What matters, really, is that he have a good, comprehensive selection of what I want! Now if what I want is a stamp here and a stamp there from several differnt countries, yes, the one with zillions from all over the world will get my order.

But often I'm looking to fill in gaps in a single country. So if a seller has only a few hundred stamps but happens to have a pretty thorough range of, say, Portuguese Congo or French Polynesia and I have a lot of holes in those countries (in some cases I'm going to bidStart to get started on a small country I have virtually nothing from, like the two I named), he'll get my order.

But yes, I go to bidStart almost always in search of a particular stamp or particular country or type of stamp. For ebay it's more often "Hey, what's so-and-so, one of my trusted sellers, got listed this week" or "what's newly listed in my particular areas right now."

I almost never bid in bidStart auctions anymore; almost all my purchases there are fixed priced stamps.

Of course I'm a classic WW collector and thus am often "doing" a country rather than seeking unusual, newly listed stuff in a hyperspeciality.

I buy as much or more on bidStart as on ebay.