I agree Bob. And our little venue here does pretty good so long as you are selling something that has a use and the price is reasonable. I’ve sold quite a bit using the free ads here. Always knew they buyer from postings here, and haven’t been burned once, or had a single complaint 
With eBay’s latest Buyer is Always Right policy I am done selling there. That philosophy is fine for big retailers, but small fries can’t afford to refund an item + shipping and not even get the product back.
Why don’t more folks (like us) us forums (like this one) to sell and buy “serious” train related stuff? Even a small fee would be O.K. if you know that your audience is made up of like-minded people like yourself. The “fee” would compensate the owner/moderator to police the forum and exclude commercial or predatory sellers. Waddayathink?
Walt
I think its a question of critical mass. I had classifieds up here for a long while, and they barely got used. I have a for sale/trade forum that gets some traffic, but I have no idea how well its used. I even had auction software set up a while ago and it got exactly ONE item listed. If people would use the classifieds, Id consider bringing them back when I switch to the new site software.
Bob, IMHO I think the sale/trade forum works well. Seems to connect buyers and sellers rather well.
Bob McCown said:Bob is there a way to have new listed items come up on the home page or on a side bar that way whenever you log on the items pop up.
I think its a question of critical mass. I had classifieds up here for a long while, and they barely got used. I have a for sale/trade forum that gets some traffic, but I have no idea how well its used. I even had auction software set up a while ago and it got exactly ONE item listed. If people would use the classifieds, Id consider bringing them back when I switch to the new site software.
Bob,
I think the sale/trade forum works very well indeed. I recently posted there that I was interested in buying a certain item and received several replies almost immediately. I exchanged emails with one gentleman and we soon negotiated a price. I think we both came away feeling we’d made a fair deal. That experience was a lot more fun than any I’ve had on ebay.
I have three other auction sites bookmarked. Traffic on these sites is extremely low relative to eBay, but if for instance everyone on this site started to list there that would be over 2500 members going there. EBay didn’t start out as big as they are today, they grew there. There are also other PayPal type sites out there as well. If we as byers/sellers don’t like eBay, lets use something else.
http://www.upbids.net/asp/index.asp
http://www.onlineauction.com/index.php?page=search:searchCategory&category_id=410
http://www.choochooauctions.com/cgi-bin/ua/main.pl
I am not advertising for any of these, just making them available. Yeah, I am sure items will move slowly at first, but good news travels fast (I hope), especially if we list and look at other sites. How many old timey major food stores from our youth have been replace by other brands? eBay is not bullet proof, nor is PayPal.
Bob C.