The Death of eBay: Where to Find the Best Deals Now
Thursday, March 24th, 2011If you’re a hard core online shopper, you’ve probably heard by now that eBay is tanking. They’re not going to disappear or go out of business. They’re just turning into a wholesaler market.
As of April 19, 2011, they’re adding a final value fee to the total price including the shipping. This means that if you order an appliance that you can only find in the U.S. and you live in Italy, your seller has to pay 9% of everything, including the $25-$30 that it’ll cost to ship it to you. So your shipping will cost more so that they can pay eBay’s fees and still be able to send you your American waffle iron or handmade African American quilts.
So as sellers are looking for new places to sell, buyers are looking for new places to buy where the markup won’t be an extra 10% or more because of site fees. Fortunately Google has a solution: Google Product Search.
Now, using the same search engine you use to find any other kind of information, Google will bring you the products you want, and you can sort by relevance or price. The way it works is that sites submit data feeds to Google Merchant Center with just the bare bones information about each product they have. So you don’t have to shovel through loads of pages to find what you’re looking for, or wonder if the site you’re looking at really has the best bargain.
In fact, if you’re looking for anything on Google, you can click the “Shopping” tab or link on the sidebar to see if there are books or other things for sale related to what you’re reading about.
So now, it doesn’t matter what any auction site does to their fees. If someone has the best price, even if it’s on their small HTML site with manually submitted feeds, you’re going to find the best deal. You won’t miss out just because some can afford to hire a team of developers and some can’t. This will make it much easier to buy direct from the source.
The only problem at the moment is that too many webmasters think it’s difficult to make a data feed. It isn’t. You don’t even need to know HTML. Once more figure this out, things are going to start moving fast. Meanwhile, I’ve found some great deals on sites I didn’t even know existed before.