Study shows eBay buyers save billions of dollars

Independent research by two statisticians finds buyers saved $7 billion that they might have otherwise been ready to pay.

The story "Study shows eBay buyers save billions of dollars" published January 27, 2008 at 10:30 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

Content from Reuters expires after 30 days.

[bjinks]

Surprising and Puzzling

I'm not surprised that consumers save a lot of money on ebay. I've done it many times. It works! What's puzzling is that with the scale of consumer savings there's really no significant ebay competitor.

[Tsee-1968031069905097881578618]

not if you've tried to sell stuff

Even if a rival site has 50% of ebay's traffic, I'd sell on ebay because it could be the difference between selling an item and not. Even if the listing fee were 0 on the rival site, I may not bother because with most items, the difference in prices you get will be much bigger than the listing fee. As most buyers don't have the time or will be unwilling to track multiple sites for what they want, so they economize by going to the most popular one where they're more likely to find items for sale.

If you've an obscure or niche item, that's even more important.