My wife and I were recently dicussing possible venues for my games. RPGNow.com, my own download site, etc. She then mentioned Ebay. I had never thought of this, but alot of people do sell things successfully on Ebay. I know it is an auction site and sales probably work differently. But they get a lot of gamers, I know I surf it regularly for stuff.

I am curious as to if any has tried this? If so what kind of experience did you have? If not do you think it woudl be worth trying?

Just a general disccussion topic on the issue.

Just a note too: They do have eBay stores and "Buy it Now" options for fixed price, meaning you don't have to have an auction for the items, but you can still have it show up in the listings.

Several publishers who release primarily through RPGnow have tried selling product through RPGnow in both purely electornic format (buying the download) as well as selling CDs of material.

To my knowledge, none found it to be successful enough to continue.

I've sold several physical books over eBay. In my experience, people there are either looking for collectibles or for a deal, though. So my signed, limited-edition pre-release sold pretty well (I offered three over the course of a year and all sold) and so have some of my misprints (usable copies in less than perfect shape like the one where the cover was put on upside down). I haven't been able to get full retail price for any of the new, standard edition books.

Also, none of my book auctions have received more than about 50-75 views, which makes me think it's not very effective to list just for the sake of being seen.

Especially since you're paying for each listing, sale or no. So listing several instances can be expensive, OR if you go via the store there is a monthly fee but unlimited listing potential.

i researched using EBAY as a sales venue when I released BW. I didn't want auctions for the games, and the store's monthly fee was just too much for a small, one product vendor.

But the buy-now option might work, if you can make a bit of a presence and get your auctions found.

I know that at least a half dozen BW sets have gone up on ebay and sold. So there is a market. But I think I agree with Justin, more for one-offs and collectibles.

-L

Would it become more viable as an overseas solution maybe?

Have a friend, say in the UK, who will post up items that would normally have to be shipped from the US. Give them 10 copies, and have them sell them gradually at fixed price on Ebay UK without the need for expensive shipping.

Not sure how viable this would be once you figure in the cost of sending the original books over from the US. It also doesn't work at all for electronic format purchases. It's also of no use if your game is available through regular channels (like sorcerer).

Might be a viable option for a FLGS over here in the UK or in europe, if they could get an exclusive contract with you for a year or something.

Using eBay for foreign sales might help in some situations, but you'd have to look at it on a case by case basis. Right now, I've had several people from Europe order direct instead of through European retailers because they can take advantage of fluctuations in the dollar's value.

Also, the cheapest way to ship books internationally is via Global Priority Mail's flat rate envelope, which has a maximum of 4 lbs (in RPG terms, I've found it holds about 350 pages worth of books, which is about 2.5 lbs) and only costs $9. Thus, it is actually cheaper to send books individually than to ship them together.