Thinking About Expanding On Line Sales.

I am currently listing 200 - 400 items per month on ebay. My sales to listing rate is something in the 25-30% range with most of what I sell receiving one bid at my opening price. Starting prices are generally 10% of catalog so are initially pretty low.
This is really just a hobby sell activity for me. However it looks to me like some other auction sites are realizing multiple bids using basically the same start price formula. I don't feel I am in the seller category of what is on SAN but HipStamp looks interesting.
Anyone selling or buying have pro or con comments about Hip or any other venues for that matter?
Your comments are appreciated.
Paul

Only as a buyer,
of late, I have been buying mint stamps from HIPSTAMP for fabulous prices,
which I have to do, to cover postage and exchange rates to Aust.
I have a few preferred dealers, and support them heavily.

I find the search function and invoicing great. No complaints thus far.

I still sell through EEbay , tempting to go over to Hipstamps, but still procrastinating.

Don't sell stamps, but have been buying a lot over the past two years. In the past 6 months I've transitioned from ebay being my primary source to Hipstamp. Found that (I am generalizing, just to be clear) there tends be a lot less weenies there, and being stamps-only; it is a lot easier to find what I'm looking for as searches only really have to factor in stamps/philatelic material.

I'll sometimes use ebay as a "check" as you never know when someone will list something for a lower price, but just from one buyer's perspective, I prefer Hipstamp. Only issue I have in general is you have to manually check the shipping rates as they don't appear on the item listing. Kind of a pain, but I do check, as I've made the mistake of buying a $2.00 stamp and then seeing $3.50 in shipping after the fact.

I suppose that, at the moment, I list around fifty stamp auction lots each month. 95% sell at the first attempt. If they don't, I reduce them until they go, or I combine them with others in a new lot. My main interests are clearing stuff out and making some money to fund other purchases in the process. I'm not trying to make every last penny, and I'm not interested in having a lot sit on ebay fir months. Partly because I don't have much interest in buying individual stamps myself, partly because I need to create space, I sell reasonably sized lots, with the occasional album. Could I be bothered with Delcampe or a similar, smaller venue? Probably not.

"My main interests are cleaning stuff out and making some money to fund other purchases ." I been doing the same thing .This is the way many collectors have improved their collections.

I took a look at your ebay sales and IMO if you want to expand online sales you have to increase your average selling price. In the last 3 months you sold 520 items with the highest priced item selling for $5.95 and 480 items selling for less than $2. I estimate your average sale is around $1.50. With ebay and Paypal fees you're working pretty hard for very little reward.

A few years ago I looked at my sales and I was averaging $7/item and I wasn't making any $ so I started buying better material, selling groups of stamps and collections etc. Over time I have raised my average sale price to $70-80 with 99.9% sell through and that seems to be as high as I can go with my current business plan but I am still trying to improve.

I think you do a nice job with your presentation and sell useful material but if you could sell higher priced material and maintain a low starting bid you would also improve your sell through rate.

For what it's worth... As a buyer (of a lot of KRelyea's material), I sure prefer e-bay's interface, filters, alerts and processes. I have tried hard to use Hipstamp but find the interface challenging (no mobile app either, I don't think) and also find the starting prices of many items to be priced much higher % of catalog price than on e-bay (not sure why, but this is my price observation)

Turtle did you get my response to your question?

Hipstamp is easy as a seller, at least if you're willing to just have hipstamp mirror your "buy it now" items. I set up a hipstamp store with 1000 items in it in less than 10 minutes. In terms of buying, I agree that ebay is easier for now but there's a benefit to having a stamp-specific platform in competition.