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[Haltingpoint]

I did a search on this but didn't turn up anything so apologies in advance if this has already been asked.

I have a niche that frequently uses eBay to sell their products. I'm looking to diversify my monetization strategy a bit and was wondering if anybody knew of any good Wordpress pluggins or other scripts that allow you to host your own auctions on your site.

I've seen some for Wordpress in my initial searches, but it doesn't appear to let you collect seller fees, which would obviously be one of my requirements since that is how it would be monetized.

Has anybody had experience with this? I assume there is a whole legal can of worms that comes along with this but I have a pretty good-natured group of users and am willing to take that risk.

I would of course want complete control of the system.

[Boom or Bust]

Hi. Welcome to ABW. What do you mean by "host your own auctions"?

[Haltingpoint]

Originally Posted by Ed Byerly

Hi. Welcome to ABW. What do you mean by "host your own auctions"?

Good question, allow me to clarify... By hosting my own auctions, I essentially mean providing a system whereby a user can submit a product image/description/minimum bid and have it display on my website (similar to the Editor Kit listings in output). Other users to the site could then bid on it and the final transaction would be handled between the buyer and seller.

I'm not nearly as greedy as eBay, so my hope is that I could significantly undercut them on fees and still make a nice sum. That, coupled with the fact that I have an authoritative site within my niche populated with users who are quite fed up with eBay from a seller/buyer standpoint, makes me think this might be a plausible monetization strategy for me to explore.

I'd prefer that Etsy had an affiliate program which is where a lot of my users have moved to. As of right now though this is the only way I can think of to possibly monetize eBay's alienated users, aside from offering ad placements for people to advertise their Etsy stores and the like. Of course if you have alternative suggestions I'm all ears!

Hope that clarifies sufficiently--thanks.

[Witzer]

I assume that you have done a Goog search......
Not sure about working with WP, but there are a number of software packages available. As for collecting all of the loot, why not us PP same as the big guy does.

[Haltingpoint]

Originally Posted by Witzer

I assume that you have done a Goog search......
Not sure about working with WP, but there are a number of software packages available. As for collecting all of the loot, why not us PP same as the big guy does.

I've done initial Google research, however the Wordpress pluggins I have found do not provide the listing payment option. Realistically, I guess I could do this the hard way and just collect PP payments and add the listings manually, but I was hoping to build this with automation in mind. Also, they do not connect the buyer and seller for payment automatically since they are built around the premise that the only things being auctioned are your own (ie. I'm hosting an auction for my own crap, not someone else auctioning something through my site).

My initial research into non-wordpress options didn't turn up much which is why I was reaching out to the ABW crowd to see if anybody had any personal experience with this.

[Boom or Bust]

Years ago I developed an auction site for a local police department to auction off impounded and unclaimed items. This isn't the kind of site you can build by just throwing in a template and using a hosting service. Auctions are database intensive and require a lot of custom programming to properly develop, that is if you hope to grow a successful service.
And then there's the question of payment methods and receiving fees. You'll need a proper merchant account as opposed to PP or Google.

[Haltingpoint]

Originally Posted by Ed Byerly

Years ago I developed an auction site for a local police department to auction off impounded and unclaimed items. This isn't the kind of site you can build by just throwing in a template and using a hosting service. Auctions are database intensive and require a lot of custom programming to properly develop, that is if you hope to grow a successful service.
And then there's the question of payment methods and receiving fees. You'll need a proper merchant account as opposed to PP or Google.

I figured that might be the case...looks like this may not be a realistic approach then unfortunately. Its a shame there isn't an easily implementable Etsy-in-a-box solution where my users could create their own stores on my site and I'd get a cut of everything sold. I'd surely purchase such a service if it existed (hint hint to all you developers...)

Any suggestions for alternate methods of monetizing Etsy users? All I can think of is my aforementioned idea of offering Etsy store owners ad placements to their stores on my site.