Certainly eBay has played a great role in the catalyst of finding or selling hard to find items on the internet. eBay became and still is a very powerful market place online. It was simply the place to go for something that you could not find in a store on the shelf. In a short amount of time eBay became a flurry of active business for plain simple folks to sell or find items from all over the globe and basically decide just how much they want to buy or sell it for. It became a source for things like that chair that you loved when you went to your grandmothers house as a child, or that baseball card that you traded away in a game of card flipping in the sixties that you always regretted letting it go. Now you could find it. Not only could you find it, you could buy it at a fair established value in the bidding process. Being able to dictate what you want to spend and possibly getting it for less than you were even willing to spend. Wow, what an incredible market place.
Although that can still be the case on eBay, it has changed tremendously, now you must toil and filter through all of the corporate giant sellers, the scam artists, etc, etc to really find that highly desired item offered by someone who is truthful and sincere in their business principles. Not to say they aren’t there, because they are. You just have to do a bit more filtering in your search and check them out real well to be sure they are a trustful seller. eBay has done many things to give you those tools as a buyer. The changes that eBay has made in the last several years is another subject I will cover in the future. In short, eBay was and still is a great market place for sellers to gain global access with their products to the masses. It is NOT the only way.
Many sellers became dependent on eBay as their sole marketing & sales channel online. That is a very dangerous situation for an online business to find themselves in. I will be writing more on my opinion, experience, and advice for anyone who is a small business that has realized the need for their business to be available online and don’t know how to go about doing just that. For those of you who sell on eBay and see the need to expand into other venues online , stop back to read my future posts on this subject. eBay is a great tool for selling online. That is exactly what it is, a tool that can be utilized with great success. You surely want to have it in your toolbox, you definitely don’t want it to be the only tool you have.