Great news for Australians fed up with eBay

If you’re Australian and fed up with selling on eBay there’s good news. An auction site has been launched for those who want to sell there.

And that’s not all of it. There’s no charge for a basic listing.

I’ve just taken a look at The Trading Post’s auction website and… it’s not so easy to find first up. Here’s The Trading Post home page.

Besides the ad for the auctions on the page, there’s very little - well, basically nothing - in the way of navigation to the auctions above the fold. Only when you get to the bottom are auction items even mentioned!

So that’s bad point number one for a potential Aussie seller. You want buyers, and The Trading Post makes it very difficult for the casual surfer to happen upon the auctions. As a web designer I know from experience that they have way, way overestimated #1 the intelligence of their users and/or #2. the patience of their users to search for something not right in front of them.

Following on from that I attempted to list an item. But the items that I sell on eBay - Chumbys - don’t have a natural category. No surprise, they don’t have one on eBay either. However, their website doesn’t even have an “other” or “miscellaneous” category - anywhere! And not only this, the current list of categories is terribly lacking in any form of comprehensiveness.

The Chumby is a computer/alarm clock, that plays internet radio to you and the weather.

I then cruised around the rest of the categories and most of them are horribly limited in their scope. Whoever put the categories together is either terribly unimaginative or lazy. It’s not like eBay was online the entire time the website was up so they could take ideas from it… oh wait, it was.

Anyway it’s an exciting announcement for my Australian seller readers given that they would save on the hideous eBay/Paypal monopoly fees, however if the early indications show anything Trading Post aren’t really all that serious about this auction site and seem to me to be hoping to fluke on a massive success with little if any effort.