Ive been buying and selling online and offline now for well over twenty years, my first experience of selling, came from helping my dad on a very cold early Sunday morning, setting up a market stall at Chepstow race course, and then watching the punters turn up in there hundreds.

I used to help him out every Sunday morning in all kinds of weather, up until the day I decided to start my own small business, which involved me buying a certain amount of meat cuts, from a local farm and then driving around my neighbourhood knocking door to door in the hope someone would buy from me. It actually took off quite well, and I earned a very nice income for the following six years.

Then I heard of an online auction site called Ebay, where I could sell items online, and post the goods to the winner bidder. Wow I thought, how hard can it be, Ive got to have a go at this, and from that day on the internet became the only place I would sell my products.

The first item I sold was a sex pistols album, which sold for double the price I paid for it, and since that day Ive made a profit from almost every item Ive sold, that is up until about a year ago when I noticed it was getting incredibly harder to find products to sell with a good profit margin, this was not down to the wholesale suppliers, for there prices remained steady with the economy. No this was down to Ebay and there ever increasing fee's and also there partner in crime paypal, who's fee's seem to border on the line of legal mugging.

Selling online over the years Ive had my ebay account suspended no less than three times, with no real explanation as to why, on each occasion I have managed to have my account reinstated, but it allways took a few weeks to sort the situations out, and in the meantime I lost alot of potential revenue. And then one day out of the blue, paypal froze my account with £3677 still inside, this money was pure profit from my sales, and I could not withdraw it to my bank account, hence I could not pay myself my monthly salary. It took almost two months before paypal unfroze my account, unusual activity in my account was there explanation for what they did.

And now as a seller, I am told I can no longer leave neutral or bad feedback for ebay buyers, whats that all about? At the end of the day ebay and paypal have made it hard work for selling online, when these companies should be going out of there way to help the small business entrepreneur, because its our money keeping these fat cats in the lifestyle they find themselves in now.

There are other auction sites out there for selling online, and there are other payment alternatives available to you as well. They just need to be used more often, instead of everyone relying on ebay and paypal, I would like to see the day when an alternative auction site with lower fee's, overtakes ebay as ranking number one, but sadly I don't think that will ever happen as ebay has the monopoly on online auction sites.

Anyway needless to say I no longer rely on just ebay for selling online, I now own four websites and I sell on a few lesser known auction sites as well, Ive provided some links below which will take you to a few of the online auctions I sell on, plus there's some links for paypal alternatives too, and some links for wholesale supplies.

Ive tried to put a link in for ebid, but it doesn't seem to work, this is a global auction site which I use regularly, you will have to copy and paste it into your web browser: www.ebid.net