Buy on one auction site and sell on another? How can this possible work. Consider the following non-scientific comparison between the two sites. Navigating to each site, I entered a search term consisting of “Digital Camera,” something that is in high demand year around. Here’s what was returned by each site:
| Auction Site | # Of Items Examined | Auction Time Remaining | # Of Items With Bids | % With Bids |
| Yahoo | 470 | 1 minute to 24 hours | 7 items had bids | 1.5% |
| eBay | 270 | 1 minute to 59 minutes | 209 items had bids | 77.5% |
Certainly this is unscientific as they types of items being listed with the keywords “Digital Camera” would not always be apples and apples, however, this seems to be a fair representation of Yahoo. PC World indicates in their comparison of eBay vs. Yahoo “The auction halls (Yahoo) often seem dead, with pages of listings and no bids.”
Can this benefit you in your pursuit of items to sell at a profit? Potentially. With little competition in the bidding arena, you would be likely to win almost any auction that you bid on. So what’s the down side? Yahoo, unlike eBay, does not base the listing fee on the starting bid of an item. Since an item could be listed at a starting bid of $1,000 or $0.99 with no difference in cost to the owner of the item being auctioned, most auctions are first listed at a high price and then reduced by the seller when they are unsuccessful. This means that true deals are harder to find, but not impossible.