QXL closes site & withdraws from UK
May 6, 2008
The online auction site QXL have announced that they are to close and withdraw from the UK marketplace. qxl.co.uk will close for business this month, with final date to list an item being Friday this week.
Final bids/buys will take place on the 19th May, and trading will cease on the 30th May at which point all accounts will be closed.
QXL have traded in the UK for as long as eBay have opened in 1997. Their name was changed to Tradus with QLX as an operating brand and were acquired by Naspers in a deal finalised in March this year.
QXL are the dominant auction platform in Poland, Switzerland, Norway and Denmark, but hasn’t been a serious contender to eBay in the UK for the last six years or so.
With the purchasers of QXL deciding to shut the platform down it’s likely to give a boost to the remaining eBay competitors - eBid, Tazbar and Cqout. The question remains how long they too can continue profitable operations in the UK?
Where will the strikers go?
February 8, 2008
I’m not convinced UK sellers have anything to worry about from the changes to eBay fees and feedback about to revolutionise the site. Certainly claims from companies such as eBid that fees will rise up to 67% are simply not true, almost every seller in the UK without exception will be greeted with lower eBay invoices soon, and that’s even if they don’t qualify for volume discounts. I’m still being contacted by sellers who believe that their eBay bills will rise although I’ve yet to find one that will.
Feedback changes appear to be still the biggest concern and doubtless the proposed eBay sellers strike will still go ahead on the 18th - 25th February. The numbers taking part will probably be small compared to the thousands of sellers on eBay today but the big question is where will these sellers go?
No seller large or small can simply afford to lose a weeks income - smaller sellers don’t generally have large funds to fall back on and larger sellers have employees and business premises that need paying regardless of income.
I’ve looked at the traffic for the main four alternative auction sites in the UK and with just ten days before the proposed strike you might expect to see an increase in activity as sellers prepare to list inventory but that’s not the case.
According to Alexa there is no discernable increase in traffic to these sites, and in fact hasn’t been for the whole of the last year.
Visiting the alternative sites doesn’t inspire confidence either, entire categories are berefit of products, and if competitors aren’t listing there already it’s for one reason alone - there aren’t any buyers. Buyers simply aren’t visiting alternative auction sites and are the most important commodity eBay has to offer. Whilst sellers might decide to list elsewhere it’s unlike they’ll be able to support their businesses on these sites. The only serious contender as an alternative is still Amazon.
If strikers are hoping to replace their income from other sources they’re going to find it difficult, the alternative is to simply give up a weeks income and that’s something not many can afford to do.
QXL bought for £750m - but not by eBay
December 16, 2007
QXL is being bought by a South African media corporation for more than £750m, reports the Sunday Times. Rumours had been circulating that eBay were to buy the online auction group, which derives most of its revenues from eastern Europe, especially Poland.
The purchasers, Naspers, own pay TV channels and newspapers mainly in South Africa, but seem to be keen to diversify abroad: just last week they bought Polish instant messaging service Gadu Gadu.
QXL was founded in 1997 by Financial Times journalist Tim Jackson. At the height of the dotcom boom, it was - albeit briefly - valued at £2bn.
Is eBay behind a QXL takeover bid?
November 7, 2007
Speculation about auction site QXL and a possible eBay takeover have been going round for months now, with little to substantiate them. However, QXL have confirmed today that they have received a takeover approach:
“The company notes the recent movement in the company’s share price and confirms that it has received a preliminary approach which may or may not lead to an offer being made for the company.”
Though any details have yet to be revealed, as Adrian Kearsey, an analyst at Evolution Securities, put it: “eBay is the obvious choice”. Shares in QXL have risen 10.6% following the news.
QXL’s free listing fortnight
June 22, 2007
QXL, “the UK’s original online auction site”, are offering free insertion fees on all listings placed from Saturday, 23 June until midnight Saturday, 7 July. Success fees (QXL’s equivalent of FVFs) and listing upgrades are not included in the offer. No doubt there’ll be a lot more people around the site than normal while this event is going on, so it could be the time to try listing on QXL if you don’t already: with currently just over 6,000 items for sale on the site, at least you won’t be running into a lot of competition.
If you *do* list there, please leave us a comment and let us know how you get on.
Should eBay buy QXL?
March 26, 2007
eBay should buy QXL according to Michael Jivkov, he argues that QXL has a clear market share in many East European territories whilst eBay is a minor player. In the UK QXL languishes way behind eBay but in Poland for instance QXL has a 95% market share. QXL also intends to move into more East European countries this year and currently faces very little in the way of competition.
Currently out of the main auction competitors operating in the UK (eBid, Tazbar, Cqout) none of the others are attractive for eBay to purchase. QXL in the UK isn’t attractive but due to their expansion in territories eBay hasn’t conquered, along with it’s profitability, QLX does have a level of attractiveness.
The best of the rest ahead of eBay 4th Quarter results
January 24, 2007
Today is the day analysts are waiting with bated breath for the close of markets and for eBay to release it’s fourth quarter results. What we weren’t expecting is analysis of the competition along with their current performance but perversely they’ve obliged - or at least Wagglepop have!
So 2,000 unique sales a week, or about 8,000 a month, just how many sellers (in eBay terms) does that equate to? Taking a medium volume seller with perhaps 500 transactions a month that means Wagglepop currently support just sixteen full time sellers. Contrasted to eBay though they would have to list 8,000 listings each, and I don’t know too many sellers who would happily run that many concurrent listings for a 1.43% sell through, it is astoundingly poor! In reality 500 transactions a month would need to be a reasonable value to sustain a seller, so it’s likely Wagglepop can support less than sixteen sellers.
They go on to compare Alexa traffic rankings with other auction sites, comparing those in the UK (with the exception of eBay and Amazon who are a quantum leap ahead) and there’s no great encouragement. Tazbar and QXL don’t have significantly more traffic, and eBid is about double, certainly not far enough ahead to suggest they have much greater sell through rate. Only eBid has three times the listings of Wagglepop with Tazbar about level and QXL trailing with a quarter the number.
The best that can be said for any of these sites is that if you have unlimited stock it won’t do you any harm by listing it and forgetting it - especially on those sites with no listing fees. None of them appear to attract the traffic to sustain a full time seller at this stage. They just don’t have the buyers required to give the sell though rates regardless how impressive the number of listings these fledgling sites manage to attract may be.
eBay gives other sites a good handbagging
January 5, 2007
Online auction sellers fall generally into one of two camps: those who like eBay, and those who hate Feebay with a passion. Those of us in the first camp - and I’m happy to stand up and be counted here - sometimes make the observation that we go where the buyers are, and the buyers are all still on eBay. The response to that is generally that we don’t know what we’re talking about.
Now Trevor Ginn, head of Auctioning4U, has given us some real listings to look at, and interesting looking they certainly are:
- CQout: No Bid, 15 viewers
- eBid: No Bid, 6 viewers
- QXL: 1 Bid at 99p, 102 viewers
- Tazbar: No Bid, No Data
Admittedly, it’s one product, but really, how conclusive can you get?
Scottish charity auctions looking good
January 3, 2007
Scotland on Sunday has an interesting crop of auctions in aid of Sightsavers on QXL. My brother in law’s an MSP, so I’m rather tempted by the chance to tell the Scottish Parliament what to debate, though if anyone wants to get me a late Xmas pressie, I’d be very happy with Alexander McCall Smith, or Rebus, or the whisky…
Polish shines for QXL
January 2, 2007
eBay-competitor QXL has bought a 75% stake in Polish price comparison site Ceneo. QXL already runs a Polish auction site, Allegro, but Robert Dighero, QXL’s acting chief executive, said that “This acquisition provides us with expertise in what is currently an underdeveloped area of the e-commerce market in Poland and the potential to develop this area in other geographic markets.”
This is an interesting strategy: QXL’s homepage lists Scandinavian and eastern European countries as their “principal operations”, without even mentioning their UK and German sites, the two European countries where eBay is strongest. It seems that QXL are trying to position themselves to pick up business that eBay, with their unfortunate concentration on China, have missed.
Why you should concentrate your sales on eBay - facts and figures
November 20, 2006
According to Alexa.com the top ten most popular sites in the UK are made up of search (eg Google, Yahoo, MSN) and community sites (MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia). Only one ecommerce site appears in the top ten and this, unsurprisingly, is eBay.co.uk, sitting comfortably in position three. The top ten is pretty stable and the next highest ecommerce site is Amazon.co.uk, just missing out at eleventh most popular.
With facts such as one in three UK Internet users visiting eBay.co.uk at least once a month it’s not surprising it’s the most popular auction site for sellers and justifiably so as the competition just don’t have the traffic. Whilst eBay performs consistently the alternative selling venues have varying fortunes.
Ebid saw an upturn in its traffic views in October which is likely attributable to the changes in Shop Inventory Format fees on the eBay site prompting sellers to try an alternative. Now in mid November this upturn has nosedived and looks more like a temporary blip then a permanent change of fortunes.
QXL jogs along with no great changes but with about forty visits per million browsers.
Tazbar, the new kid on the block, looks more hopeful but bear in mind it’s early days. Having ambled along averaging ten views per million browsers it’s skyrocketed to forty in the last month. (TV Advertising effect?) The real question is are all the views from sellers or do they have some buyers yet? Completed listing searches don’t fill you with confidence.
All these sites pale into insignificance when eBay is thrown into the mix though. Alexa shows steady traffic, averaging some seven thousand views per million browsers confirming its status as the granddaddy of the auction sites. If you want to know where you’re most likely to get sales put your money into eBay fees because the other sites added together don’t even register as a blip on the horizon. If you do want an alternative your only hope as a serious seller right now is that your products fit Amazon’s portfolio.
We often wonder what it would take for a serious contender to eBay, and the answer is traffic, and lots of it. Tempting promises of free listing fees simply serve to fill the site with items that eBay largely escapes except on cheap listing days. Sure it bumps up the number of listings on the site but then when a hard won buyer eventually arrives any quality goods are swamped by the dross. It doesn’t matter how great a site looks, what counts is if a site can attract the buyers but currently only eBay is worth a serious seller concentrating on.
Is the marketplace big enough for a serious contender? Almost certainly yes and a monopoly is never healthy. Is there one out there? For the professional online sellers looking at return on time and investment the answer is not yet but maybe soon - only time will tell.
Recent Comments
- Whirly: #3 you don’t deserve one after having a 1p listing festival you jammy blighter.
- Chris Dawson: #1 I didn’t get a voucher either
If anyone has one and wants to spend it with me... - northumbrian: the only fault with that bling thing is if anything it makes the item look to good
- faculty-x: us techies are honoured at the mo from ebay or the ones that have dropped off ebay the most, us...
- faculty-x: bling looks excellent, must get a copy. been messing around with coral for years, should save ages. so...
- Whirly: No voucher for me which is a pain as I need some stuff I know a buyer who will get one, he likes...
- Whirly: #2 If you build the fee’s into your sale price I think it’s a justifiable expense, we regularly...
- Trish Connolly: I need to dissagree with part of your statement. You say, “I’ve met many buyers who are more...
- J R: if we sell something for £500 there is no way we would be willing to give ebay £50 plus Paypal fees, there...
- Whirly: lmao
