Sell your junk for no fee (yahoo.uk.com)

Member Name: hugon

Product:	yahoo.uk.com
Date:	03/08/01 (863 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: NO FEE!, Wide range, Easy to use and maintain

Disadvantages: Some timewasters, Not always a lot of bidding, A lot of junk and counterfiet stuff

I first came to use Yahoo! Auctions after I had a bit of a clear out and had some stuff I wanted rid of, but I didn’t particularly fancy throwing away. I had used ebay to see a couple of larger items, but these where VHS videos that I only wanted a pound or two for. Seeing as I didn’t know if anyone would want to buy them or not, I decided to pop them up on Yahoo auctions as they offer a no fee service, where you can list items for free, and also you don’t have to pay commission if your item sells. If you want your item to be a feature item or in bold, then you have to pay a fee, but otherwise it’s free, free, free!

You can get to yahoo auctions by going to the Yahoo.co.uk homepage and clicking on the auctions button in the top left, or you can type http://uk.auctions.yahoo.com into your browser. The auctions homepage allows you to move to your account page, browse the individual categories, displays a few of the featured auctions and also some featured sellers. There are also links to various Yahoo sections, like the clubs and music, as well as the top ten searched for items on the site. To me, the hompage is a little off putting – it’s quite small and cluttered, a bit like the Yahoo homepage itself, and looking for the correct link can be quite difficult. The simplicity means it’s quick to load, however, at certain times of the day, particularly the evening, the site can slow to a crawl with plenty of time out errors, which quickly becomes frustrating when you’re trying to bid or add an auction.

To bid or submit an item, you must have a yahoo identity. You’re bound to have one, Yahoo seems to own so much of the internet these days that it’s impossible to get buy without at least one. Well, if you don’t, it’s probably worth getting one so you can get their email service and the multitude of other things they give you. You also have to enter a credit card number so they can aut
henticate you if you are selling, which will rule out people without credit cards, which is a shame. It took me a while as I had to wait for my Visa card to come through as it refused to accept my Switch card. Once you have your account, you can see anything that relates to you on your identity page – you can see a list of the items you’re selling, the items you have bid on, the items you are watching, and details of any auctions you have won or sold. Emails regarding your auctions don’t have to be sent to your yahoo account, you can nominate another email to have them sent to, which makes things considerably easier.

Bidding for an item is simply a case of entering the maximum you want to bid for, entering your password and waiting to see how it goes. Yahoo does the standard bidding by proxy for you, where you enter the maximum you will pay for it, and Yahoo will continue to bid for you until that maximum is reached if it is below the reserve, or another user is bidding against you. It’s simple to find items, either using the search engine, or browsing by category. You can limit your searches to items with pictures, items with no reserves, or even items that have been added that day, and you can also search within the various categories and sub categories to narrow your search down.

To submit an item for sale, you must first of all find the relevant location to place it. Once you click “submit item”, a list of categories is displayed, and you must select categories until you reach the bottom level of the correct category. From there, it is a case of giving the auction a title, minimum price, closing date and reserve if nessecary and description. You can select if you want the buyer to pay postage, and if you send on completion of the auction, or once payment is received. A nice touch is being able to put the price of postage in an actual field in the description. You can either upload up to three pictures to Yaho
o auctions to show your item, or you can use HTML in the description field to illustrate your item. Other useful things you might like to try are restricting bidders to only those with a certain feedback level, to avoid those timewasters with negative feedback. You can also nominate a value that the bidder can pay to end the auction there and then, or you can set your auction up as first win bids. Should there be no bids on your auction by the time it closes, or no winning bids above the reserve, you can have Yahoo automatically resubmit it up to five times until it is sold.

As well as being able to use HTML in your descriptions, you can also customise your “auction booth” which allows you to use different colours for your headings and background, adding images and links to personalise your auctions and make them stand out a little more – highly effective and useful if you sell lots of items online, so that the bidder instantly recognises that it is one of your auctions.

I have a few gripes – there is no email sent once a user bids on your item, and it requires you to keep logging in to your account to see if anyone has bid on it. Once the auction is closed, an email is sent to both parties giving them each others details so they can arrange payment and postage costs. A standard email is provided, which you can customise with your own message should you wish to. Email is sent once you bid on an item, or once you are outbid, like most auction sites. You can use the options menu to turn your email notifications off and on as nessecary.

If everything has gone successfully, you can give the bidder or seller feedback, and hopefully they do the same for you. Feedback is an essential part of the site and allows you to see who is a reliable trader and who is not – bidders who bid and do not pay, or those who do not send items will receive negative feedback and should be avoided. You can see a user’s feedback by
clicking on their username, and you will see who has commented on them. Clicking on their name also allows you to see what else they are currently auctioning, auctions they have sold in the past and any details they have provided for display on the site.

The site is fairly active, with about 500,000 auctions going on at any one time. However, there never really seems to be that much bidding going on, and the majority of auctions seem to close with no bids. It’s probably due to the fact that there is no fee, people are more likely to put the items up “just in case” – there is a lot of tat on the site, I’ve even seen the Pokemon Tazo’s you get free with crisps. If I was looking to sell a big item, I’d use ebay, but if it was just a few pounds, I’d put it up here and see how it goes. It also doesn’t seem to be as tightly regulated as ebay, a quick search for any of the big name current cinema releases will return a list of people selling dodgy cdr copies, and there are plenty of copied Playstation games as well. It’s obvious that Yahoo don’t pay much attention to this, as it clearly advertises that they are copies.

If you're a book lover, you should find plenty of books, and cheap ones at that too - there are plenty of paper backs for £1, and one bid should win, so even after adding about a pound for postage, they're still cheaper than the second hand shop, and there's a greater range, and it's easy to browse by typing the name of the author ot book you're looking for.

It’s not quite as good as ebay, but in my opinion, I prefer it to QXL. Above all you have to remember that it’s free, so it isn’t going to be as thorough as ebay is. Because it is free, there is no insurance to cover items going missing or you losing payment to a bad seller or bidder, so you really do need to be careful and look for those with negative feedback. It would be n
ice to see a lot more people bidding instead of uploading rubbish onto the site, but I suppose I have been guilty of that as well, so I’m not really in a position to complain. Like I said, it’s free, so what have you really got to lose?

Good if you want:

Put cheap items up for no cost
Good feedback system
Plenty of options when auctioning an item

Bad if you don’t want:

A lot of rubbish for auction
Not much bidding going on
No insurance
Lots of counterfeit goods

Summary: