Some time ago now, eBay removed the restriction on its affiliates that prohibited them from marketing their own eBay listings. This means a significant number of eBay sellers, savvy enough to run their own blogs or websites, are now offsetting their eBay fees and, quite often, earning over and above their seller fees from eBay. Effectively they are now being paid to sell stuff on eBay!

For years eBay's competitors have been trying to tempt sellers solely based on the lower fees they charge. Some even charge no fees whatsoever, presumably in the hope they will receive an income from Google Adsense advertising. However, the absence of a realistic income for these sites means their marketing budgets are thin at best and often non-existent. The result is sellers either get a poor level of sales or they have to work hard to generate the potential buyer traffic themselves.

So many eBay wannabees fail to grasp the importance of getting their users and internet marketers to work with them to grow a marketplace website. Of the few eBay alternatives that do offer modest incentives to webmasters and affiliates, virtually all fail to realise that they need to be using affiliates to generate actual sales rather than just new accounts (many of which become dormant and unproductive in no time).

For example, what's the difference between a Delcampe affiliate and one working with eBay? Delcampe pay them 2.5 Euros for a new account introduced once feedback is left whereas eBay will pay them for every click through to the eBay website and the clicks are valued according to the overall business being generated by the affiliate's clicks over time. Yes eBay credit affiliates for new accounts within this set up but, most importantly, they reward their affiliates when the off eBay marketing efforts they carry out actually sell an item and generate revenue for eBay.

eBay's huge affiliated workforce are effectively marketing for all the sellers on eBay. They are constantly innovating, blogging, chatting, Twittering, searching, displaying and attracting internet users to their websites and then pre-selling eBay listings. They do this because eBay uses a large chunk of their fee income to reward affiliates for the traffic and sales they generate. Some affiliates are small scale and focused on small product niches meaning they perhaps earn a few tens of dollars a month to offset their eBay selling fees. Others are huge, generating significant volumes of targeted traffic that converts to sales on a massive scale.

The beauty of a good affiliate from eBay's point of view is they work as hard as they want to and largely pay for themselves over time. Yet most alternatives to eBay don't appear to understand this virtuous process and, worse still, seem incapable of managing or rewarding an effective affiliate workforce to benefit their marketplaces and sellers.

eBay wannabees must realise that a good, competent and businesslike marketplace seller is almost certainly capable of running a blog or website about the products they sell. By using the eBay affiliate model run under the banner of the eBay Partner Network, these sellers will be offsetting their eBay fees or even eliminating them altogether and generating additional revenue on top. So why would they ever move to another cheap site, work harder for poorer sales or pay seller fees they can't mitigate?

For more than a year I have been paid more by eBay every month than they have charged me for selling items. Do you think I bother about their fees that much? Do you think I will look at using any alternative site where sales results are worse and more expensive?