Speaking of Ebay, I'm fortunately being able to do bussiness quite well. All the items I've listed have had had bids. I've already shipped off two of them. It's great to do business in a much larger market.
The portuguese market is a good one, but we lack a refined auction system like Ebay that makes selling and buying a whole lot easier.
We have a few platforms, like Miau.pt and Leiloões.net, also a few different versions of Craigslist-style websites where you can post garage sales and such, but none of them even come close to what Ebay does.
There's also another inherent problem with the portuguese market is that the local online shopper tends to be very picky. What I mean by picky is that often times they behave like tourists in Morroco trying to forcefully convince the seller to lower shipping and handling, sometimes the actual value of the item.
It happens because most of the times because there's only one buyer that wants that one item, it's a very rare case of buyer monopoly and thus low-balling becomes common pratice. As a general rule it is never wise to sell an item at a very low price.
The other major complication is that on portuguese auction sites you do not have sort of system that allows you to send out invoices or such, basically, you pay for a listing fee and when the auction ends you have to work it out with the buyer through e-mail. But what if the buyer has a change of heart and refuses to pay? Tough luck and that's none of the auction websiste's business. I neglected to mention that there's also a sales fee based on the final value.
I've been stiffed out of 75 bucks(note: that's a total from a series of auctions where I was owed money, not including sales fee for each sale), that's where I drew the line.
I now only sell stuff on Ebay, at least, people there have standards.
