With so many e-commerce platforms and tools out there, why is eBay your marketplace of choice?

Image by liewcf via Flickr

At the eBay On Location in Orlando, FL, I submitted a question for Griff Seller’s Panel that actually ended up being the one they ended on. I asked of the sellers on the panel:

“With so many e-commerce platforms and tools out there, why is eBay your marketplace of choice?”

The sellers mostly used this as an opportunity to gush about eBay and while it probably made for a great ending for the panel from eBay’s standpoint, I was disappointed. See… I wanted a real answer. Because as we cover pretty frequently on this there are a lot of different selling options out there and all of the sellers on the panel had (mostly) all their eggs in the eBay basket. One of the sellers was cross platform selling but he seemed to be the only one.

Yes, there are some great things about eBay. But it’s obviously not perfect and those sellers were using it as their primary platform. That’s a huge vote of confidence and I want more insight into this. Those sellers all believe in eBay very strongly or they wouldn’t be at that event, up on stage in that panel and, most importantly, building their business around it. What do they know that the rest of us don’t?

My biggest question is… why? Did you try other platforms and decide that the benefits of eBay outweigh the disadvantages? Did you just get started on eBay and your business was doing well so it wasn’t worth it to move to another platform? Were you burned on another platform and eBay was the better experience? Have you even tried another platform or are you just sticking with what’s familiar? If you’re doing such a large sales volume, why haven’t you moved your business to your own website?

I really wanted to know the answer to this and I was left hanging. So I’m posing it to you instead because I think it’s a really interesting topic. If you are a seller that still does any worthwhile percentage of your business on eBay, why? Why haven’t you moved beyond eBay to another platform, marketplace or even a shopping cart on your own website? In short, why eBay?

Let’s get this discussion started…