eDirectory – Is it any good?
Feb-2008
I was recently asked by a client whether they should sell thorough eDirectory. eDirectory is a fixed price marketplace which sells across a range of different categories ranging from electronics to flowers. The system is similar to Amazon marketplace in that seller submits details of their products and the whole selling process takes place on the eDirectory site.
I don’t really know what to make of eDirectory. On the plus side it has an Alexa rank of 21,000 which would seem to indicate that it gets around 10,000 unique visitors a day and is also a PR of 5. What does slightly worry me about it is that it has such a low profile, I have never seen any offline or online advertising. Apparently they charge £1000 to sign up for the marketplace which also concerns me as they as this is not a model used by the top marketplaces. Perhaps they are good at selling their service but not delivering much value after that? Commission is 8%.
Does anyone have any experiences to share?
I’ve no direct personal experience but those who I know have tried the site come back with a resounding “Don’t waste your money”. I’d be interested to hear from those that have made it a success though to balance the equation and remove my impression that they’re better at selling the site than the site is at selling goods.
I am currently preparing a product file for the site, It is not as easy as ebay from experience as it has to be put together in excel/csv format and in my mind takes much longer and bores my head off. They did say that they’d taken on a few more sites to advertise on, which were luckily? my target market. Their site has a page rank of 5 and they did turn over 33m last year. One thing is that they try not to repeat same brand products so there is not the competition you would get like Amazon and ebay. It’s gotta be worth a shot for a year…. it is expensive but I would of liked a bit more advertising of their site and brand like ebay/amazon. another advantage is that all of your products are on view unlike a few on ebay at auction and so many tucked away in ‘My Shop’
Commission is 10% as I was told 🙁
We were approached by e-directory and signed up after searching the web and finding postive and negative reports. e-directory felt we would achieve 5 to 15 sales a day which sold it to us. We paid £795 set-up and are on 6% commission. We have been active for 3 months now and not a single sale yet – not one. We have found the after sales service poor and of course are very disappointed with the lack of sales (well that is putting it mildly I could say a lot more about the lack of sales!). The products we have listed all sell well on our own site. I would say don’t touch it with a barge pole.
We have been on it over a year now on the same original fee and last month Wham! we got 5 orders… the first 5! and now nothing again.. The reason methinks is because of this new thing they are doing to revamp it as Myfaveshop… bit like facebook shopping recommendations. It sounds very interesting but they have a lot of marketing to do to get it known.