Auctiva sold to Alibaba
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Many eBay sellers would have come across auctiva.com during their journey.
I’ve used Auctiva from the very beginning and have always had mixed feeling towards it. When I started using it in mid 2007 it was still free and it was certainly a great addition to our online business. It enabled us to put up to 24 pictures to eBay linting while eBay would only allow a single free image and charged for any additional pictures. It had a cross promotion tool that created a slide-show of other listings and had a great scheduling function (for free as opposed to eBay’s paid service. Auctiva provided great templates for eBay listings and it was relatively easy to use. I also liked the image hosting service of Auctiva and hosted images for my websites as well (up until I come across ezS3, however, I still have many imaged stored on Auctiva from those days. The site had quite a lot of technical issues and it was rather frustrating at times when you needed to send up listings in a larger quantity or at a specific time and the site was not responding for hours. Their customer service however, is reasonably quick and very kind. So over all it is a good experience.
I always been in niches with larger ticket items and less volume so I have not relied on Auctiva as much as smaller seller selling $20 items by the thousands would have.
Back then Auctiva tried to monetize on the platform by offering transport insurance. They transport insurance offer would go out with every listing (for user that had not changed the default settings). It was hard to imagine that the model worked and it was kind of underpinned when they introduces a new structure to monetize on the platform in June 2009. This time they proposed a ChannelAdvisor type of charging structure pinching into the sellers profit based on a certain percentage of the sell price. Kind of like eBay does it themselves. Their user base responded outrageously and Auctiva ended up sending out a big apology from the CEO to their client base. They introduced a low monthly free structure instead. A basic account subscription is $2.99 or something like that. It was obvious once again that this model is not going to deliver huge profitabilty.
So Auctiva ended being taken over by Alibaba, China’s top e-commerce operator. They are not disclosing how much they paid for it…would have been interesting to know.
Most of us eBay sellers have been to alibaba.com and have would have followed their growth. I used to look on Alibaba for suppliers for days on end. I never wormed to madeinchina.com, however quite liked Alibaba. I learned that you better of registering an email particularly dedicated to your Alibaba account as all kind of spammers appeared a few days and weeks after opening my account. Aside from that I only had good experience with Alibaba.
I never thought of them buying Auctiva however, after all it makes perfect sense I guess. Auctiva already has more than 170,000 active users so it quite a good gain for the new owner.
I am very curious to see where Alibaba takes Auctiva….
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