The Armour Archive

Like many of you, I am sick of ebay and note the lackluster effort being put fort by any potential competitors. I have been thinking for awhile about starting an auction site that initially focuses on the medieval/living history marketplace. I actaully have a domain purchase that I have been maintaining for 2 years. I know this would be a good idea, but I don't know where to start. Where I live does not have any hard land lines/cable/or high speed optical, but the next town over does. I do however have 4G out here. I figure I would need to start with a server, auction software, and a network connection. What kind of server would I need for say a max of 50K listings and 10K registered users. The neighboring town, Jacumba, has just lost it's last employer, the town peaked at 5000 in 1970, it now has 150, and 3 blocks of vacant storefronts for $150-200 a month. I know that the SCA Auction was tried years ago, but I got tired of having to relist all my stuff every 3 days when the operator got a new server.

Thoughts?

For those who don't know, I was effectively the first to offer new armour on an organized basis on ebay wayyyyyyyyyyyy back in 1999 and I want to get that fun back

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Purchase a hosting plan from a webhost. It is affordable and reliable.

if you do it I would be interested in using it.
I already use the evul ebay and have enough sales to be a powerseller
I also use ebid, see the link in my sig and get sales there quite often

Galfrid atte grene wrote:Purchase a hosting plan from a webhost. It is affordable and reliable.

This.

You need to see it get some traction before you go spending thousands on hardware and fiber.

Sounds like a promising idea. An alternative to eBay would be welcome. Their fees are out of hand.

True, there is eBid, however I haven't been able to sell jack there myself on the US eBid site.

on ebid you need to sell differently.
doing it right means automatically getting all your listings on google shopping within an hour of posting them.
it is free to list and relist so list lots of stuff
dont use run till sold, things never get to the top of searches that way
I list for 10 days and auto relist 10 times so only need to manually relist every 100 days
with 150 items listed I get sales every week and sometimes several a day.
I do choose an option I pay for but only if the item sells.
average monthly ebay bill is about 100 uk pounds ( 150 usd )
average monthly ebid bill is about 4 uk pounds ( 6 usd ) for about the same sales.

I sell cheaper on ebid as it costs me less
some items in my range on ebay ( like 2 of the 4 types of firebox ) mention the others that are only on ebid and if people ask I tell them they can also buy the 2 on ebay cheaper if they use ebid.

Last December...$250...so when should I consider you a fraud?

That would be a good idea to have a medieval auction site. There are always people looking for new armor or replacement armor.

Didn't someone have one set up a year or two ago? I didn't think it got much use, but it was advertised here on classifieds.

Saritor wrote:Didn't someone have one set up a year or two ago? I didn't think it got much use, but it was advertised here on classifieds.

There was, but they seemed to have constant server issues. At one point I got 3 email notifications in a week that I needed to relist my stuff from scratch. The volume went down about 70% from that point on.

Eric

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