Yahoo, Free Auctions! (yahoo.uk.com)

Member Name: dodidle

Product:	yahoo.uk.com
Date:	24/07/01 (369 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good Selling Features, Good Search Engine, Free

Disadvantages: Not so well known

Yahoo auctions is the ultimate place for sellers. The only thing it lacks is.. Buyers!!
Yahoo has everything you need to create a free auction, and even has some very helpful features.

During this review I will only be comparing Yahoo auctions to ebay.co.uk because, quite frankly, the other auction sites don't have a chance!!

Unlike ebay when you are looking at items in a particular category you can just click the 'Submit Item' button at the top of the page to submit an item to that category. Just like ebay, Yahoo lets you upload pictures and submit your items using HTML.

Once the auction has been uploaded all you need to create a favourite link to your 'Selling' page and then just click it to see if any of your items have had bids. No signing in etc, like ebay. Then when click each item you are selling to view it there is a nice little box in the top-right of the page saying how many pageviews there have been and how many people have added to their 'Watchlist'

Yahoo are original, they were first to come up with many of the selling options there are today, the 'Buy Now' option and 'Resubmit' option for example, Yahoo not ebay. So if your auction doesn't sell first time (which it quite often doesn’t :-) it automatically resubmits upto 5 times, without you having to do a thing! You just sit looking at your email inbox, waiting for an email saying 'Congratulations, your auction closed successfully!).

I almost always use Yahoo for selling stuff, who cares if the stuff doesn't sell first time, it might not on ebay, but at least it's free!! No listing fees, no fees for extra pictures, no final value fee, no fees for a thumbnail picture!!
That’s the selling bit over, but is it good for buying?

Depends... when do you want the item?
If you want an item quickly you will have to use ebay, as there will probably be many more of the same
item for sale, with one finishing soon.

If you want it cheaper, and don't mind maybe having to wait a little longer, just look on Yahoo.
Rare items, such as import CDs, are also found in larger numbers on ebay, but are usually cheaper if you wait for one to appear on Yahoo. Good things come to those who wait!

Mind you Yahoo has one other very useful feature, the 'Buy Now' option. On ebay the 'Buy Now' option disappears after the first person has bid. The buy price is usually a lot higher than the first bid price anyway and is not usually worth using. On Yahoo the buy option stays throughout the whole auction, and is also available on Dutch auctions, which means you can use it to sell off a lot of things quickly.

When it comes to non-paying bidders, I have experienced and heard about just as many non-paying bidders on either site.

The Yahoo site has a much better search engine. It allows you for a start to search closed auctions, to see the price items have finished at before, this option was introduced to ebay.com but not ebay.co.uk. I have found this feature very useful, as I can work out if I am selling the item for too much, or paying too much for something, or if I have a real bargain! :-)

When you search for a product it also lists underneath whether the item has a reserve price, something which can be annoying on ebay is you have to click each product to see if it has a reserve or not. This also saves more time. One last extra feature the Yahoo search has is, after completing a search, it then has 2 links at the bottom to go straight to a 'Description and title' search or a 'Completed Items' search.

I think I have covered must points but to sum it up, Yahoo who has better selling and searching facilities, but not that popularity edge, for some reason.

I hope you find this review useful :-)

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