e-baying from Spain?

HHmmmm No one has ever e-bay'd?? Maybe I'll be the first in spain.....lol.

From what i have seen on ebay spain, there isnt much selling going on. Maybe there is another site that everyone advertises on and if so could someone let us know as i would like to sell some equestrian products when i come to spain.

Also with regards to postage what service does the post office use, has anyone a clue then we can both look up on the internet at their prices

We're about to embark upon selling on Ebay from Spain as we did quite well before we moved over from the UK. Because we had an account set up already in the UK, it was quite easy to transfer it over. Obviously the beauty of Ebay is it's worldwide.

Good Luck Heath, I have sold from Canada and just hoped for some first hand experiences. Please keep us updated on how your change over goes, and hopefully post a link and we can see what your selling?? Have you posted regular mail overseas from Spain? If so how do prices compare?.

Initially it does'nt look as though the postage is any more expensive than the UK to ship overseas, but then again, we're going to try to keep to small packets. Will keep you posted of how things go for us though.

I will be sticking to small packets too that is the best for selling on e-bay.

What is it that you sell? Retail merchandise or hand crafted?

Do you sell on the uk ebay but post worldwide.
Also what is the website for pricing your postage if not in small package

Try:
MoneyBookers.com (https://www.moneybookers.com/app/?rid=3548463)

It's similar to Paypal.com, but it accepts all currencies worldwide.

Why, does paypal not work in spain??

i think paypal only deals with American banks and currency. with money bookers you can connect your account with most any bank worldwide.

PayPal works in 190 countries and deals in 16 different currencies - see here https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-country-functionality-outside&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f941d8253416939c6899ae213b0cf474d95d81ae9e4f220d1

You will need to setup both an eBay account and a PayPal account in Spain to avoid complications - e.g. you cannot send or receive money to a UK PayPal account from a Spanish Bank account - but you can still reach buyers world-wide by choosing where you want your products to be available to.

eBay and PayPal both co-operate with the authorities, so don't forget to keep proper records for tax purposes!

I have heard a couple of horror stories abour ebay.es and similarily paypal.es I can only suggest that if you are going to use ebay that you only supply Spain.

Regards

I Ebay from Spain..... the postage costs are higher as most people I sell to are in the UK so you need to be careful what you sell.. something I put on at first just don't shift because they just don't like the postage costs.
For postage see the Spanish Correos site:
http://www.correos.es/dinamic/plantillas/home1.asp
I use the registered delivery which requires a signature the other end, not the cheapest, but at least it means I have a tracing system, which you can trace on the spanish site and also the UK parcelforce one with the aid of the tracking number that they give you when you post the parcel.

I'll only use paypal, and not accept debit or credit card payments thru it as it costs too much as a private paypal account. But you can set any items you sell to block people without a paypal account.

i have fould paypal that 4 - 5 % off your the selling price is taken by this companys and you can end out off pocket , with debit or credit card payments you wait 24 hours befor shipping 1-3 % is taken by them companys and you never lose out as your protected when i process the cards i am told with in mins off any robbed cards

Some people used ebay with stolen paypal , credit cards and so on but you just have to be careful
befor i shipped a unit and got cought out with paypal so i now wait 24 hours befor shipping any think
dhl have a recall on all thinks shipped so you call it back befor gets in two wrong hands (i found this very helpful )
here story that blow your mind with ebay and paypal ....

A Galway internet user got the shock of his life this week when he received a genuine invoice from eBay for ?2 million which he had apparently spent on buying three million music albums online - the world's largest record collection which went on sale this month.
The massive collection was being sold by Pittsburgh-based collector Paul Mawhinney and the winning bid had allegedly come from a man based in Galway.
However, the bid has turned out to be a fraud.
The bidder, who was signed in as the Galway man, had claimed he would shell out $3,002,150 (?2,021,922) for the collection of nearly three million vinyl albums, singles and CDs being sold by Paul Mawhinney,
An agent for the sale, J Paul Henderson, said an eBay executive notified him on Friday night that the bid was not legitimate and that the bidder's account had been suspended, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
An Irishman whose screen name appeared with the winning bid said he was unaware of the bid until after it had been entered and that he had been a victim of identity theft.
The newspaper had earlier reported the winning bidder was based in Galway.
"He claims he went to an Internet cafe and got the e-mail with the invoice from us and wondered, ?What the hell is this??? Henderson said at the weekend.
Mawhinney said he began collecting the records when he opened his record shop, Record Rama, in 1968. He closed it on Thursday, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family.
"I am legally blind," he said. "I had a couple of strokes a few years ago ... and it's time at my age to think about doing something else with my life."
Mawhinney said on Saturday that he had already contacted six other bidders who had pledged more than $3 million (?2 million) on eBay and three others who approached him independently.
"It's still going to happen," he said.
Mawhinney (68) said that after 41 years he has seen his business gradually erode as the music industry has moved online. In 2002, he considered selling the collection to the Library of Congress, which at the time had about one million albums.
"It's time to go," said Mawhinney. "It's time to retire."
Mawhinney said he hopes that whoever buys the archive will donate some of the rarer albums in the collection to a museum. The six million unique pieces of music in the collection would take 57 years to listen to from beginning to end.
Every recording in this amazing collection has been purchased by its owner, Paul Mawhinney, over a period of a half-century, and stored in a 16,000-square-foot climate-controlled warehouse. Many millions of dollars have been invested in the acquisition and storage of the collection, the estimated value of which is now greater than $50 million dollars.His plan hit a rough patch as the collection passed the 160,000 mark: His wife told him that either he had to go or the records did. He stayed, and the records went into a climate-controlled warehouse.

ebay.es is very little used.

The Spanish mostly seem to use other auction/private advert type sites.

One of the biggies here is www.segundomano.es

You can google for several others too.

You can of course continue to use an ebay.co.uk account from Spain, but selling to the UK (or to anywhere else outside of Spain) will push up the postage charges quite a bit, and may well make the total price of your goods uncompetitive.

> Trogg:- e.g. you cannot send or receive money to a UK PayPal account from a Spanish Bank account


So does that mean that you cannot move monies from a UK paypal account into a Spanish Paypal account, and then fund into a Spanish bank account linked to that......from that?

I am slightly confused - Maybe I have misunderstood....?

I have sold on ebay spain-----my boyfriend an I have learned that it can fly and it can?t. It depends, the postage is more expensive, just pack it as tight as you can. I?m from the U.S. and sold my first item here in Spain --I sell all kinds of stuff ---when I sell --I?ve got a target market and I know who I want to sell to, I have sold from bags to antique some small antique pieces. But I have decided it is better if you want to sell in spanish ebay ---do worldwide --better chances of selling -but nore likely in E.Union --because to the U.S. tooooooooooo expensive and have lost sales prospects for that reason.

> [quote]Trogg:- e.g. you cannot send or receive money to a UK PayPal account from a Spanish Bank account


So does that mean that you cannot move monies from a UK paypal account into a Spanish Paypal account, and then fund into a Spanish bank account linked to that......from that?

I am slightly confused - Maybe I have misunderstood....?[/quote]

PayPal isn't ready for expats. I don't eBay, but I have an editing business and to accept credit cards in dollars and euros and then be able to deposit that money into either my American or Spanish bank accounts, I have four PayPal accounts: one business account and one personal account linked to my American bank and another set of accounts linked to my Spanish bank. If for some reason I want to turn some of the euros into dollars, or vice versa, I move it from the business account in question to the personal account, then to the personal account in the other country, and next into my bank account. (If I did this all through the business accounts, I would get charged a transaction fee - twice on the same money! This is on top of PayPal's exchange rate, which isn't the best but not the worst.) This method is a bit complicated perhaps, but it works out.

I'm ok as I still have a UK based bank account, so I can transfer money into it if I wish to, but we use the internet quite a bit so having the balance in Paypal is quite handy!

I have sold believe it or not to people from Spain. Receiving funds from the U.K. --I?m not sure about. What I would suggest is that you send a message to e-bay customer service --they will answer your question.

Ebay have community pages (the link is at the top of your ebay pages) where you can search for topics relating to ebay, paypal, postage etc and ask questions and get answers from other ebayers

Hi

There was another thread about this and I replied there too :)

We are in Co?n Spain and we have an Ebay account that is connected to our Spanish PayPal account, however, we do not ship to anywhere but inside Spain (including the islands) and Portugal, mainly because the postage of a storage cab for tools would cost too much!

We advertise all our products on Ebay as well as our website and it works very well, it is a good addition to our online business.

We have had very little problems for the past year and now have a good rating with Ebay as a seller.

Our PayPal account is also connected to a Spanish bank, it all works very well.

Hope that helps :)

You can view our shop here if you would like
http://myworld.ebay.es/pdses2007/

Hi Fiona...

Ebay like many people say on here is very little used as its not really trusted... Paypal is also a nightmare... Plus Spanish Customs is entitled to check all goods going out and in from Spain I bought lots of things from the UK and US from Ebay Clothes, Gold Chain... so on.... I received letters from Spanish customs saying I am in receipt of Counter fit Goods!!!!!!!!

I stopped using EBAY in 2006 When Most of my goods were received Smashed also the items i sent to the customer they never received....

Good Luck and Wish you well!

Regards

Anthony

I second what was said earlier. As an Ex-pat in Madrid, i tried to use Ebay as i did in the UK and it was rubbish. The majority of things on Ebay.es were from UK sellers and traffic rank to Ebay.es is not very good.

Segundamano.es is the top site here in Spain.

It's a different culture here. Segundomano has a printed edition for a long time so people are familiar with the company and their materials and are used to doing business with other individuals either by mail, email, face-to-face or phone. Ebay is some foreign online presence with no physical presence in the Spaniards' minds so they come with little trust or seriousness. I've done transactions in the past but mostly has been with foreigners (French, English) but not with a Spaniard. I think it's a good site if you plan on doing business with expats online.

......good advice on this thread, but when i checked the link someone posted about segundomano it comes up with an error page?

we ebay in the UK and have done VERY well out of it. we are moving to the alicante area and cant wait to hit the car boot sales to get some more ebay stuff!!

I agree, dont bother with ebay.es. the spanish dont spend as much time on ebay as the uk. (they have better things to do with their time!!!!!)

we have a uk ebay and paypal account. i dont know if you can transfer funds from paypal.co.uk to a spanish bank account, however i do know that you can set your default currency to euros instead of pounds.

i'll have to email them, however be warned if anyone else is thinking of asking ebay, their customer service is notoriously crap and they employ low paid ignoramuses who simply read whetever is on the screen in front of them, but if anyone knows the asnwer please do let us know as we are keen to get our ebay back up and running when we arrive in spain although it will be selling on ebay.co.uk and not ebay.es

The only thing i can remotely think of that would (and does) do well on ebay.es is SCALEXTRIC CARS!!!!!! (seriously). and we have sold loads of that sort of stuff to spaniards. 2ND HAND CAR PARTS also do well. but thats about all i can think of.

I am new to Ebay, but have decided to take the plunge.
I have only bought so far - from the UK site... & paid in two different ways (one I arranged for an Echeque to be debited from my
UK current bank account - but then the cheque has not cleared into my PayPal - which I am still waiting for as vendor one has decided her PayPal account does not work at present???
I have asked Ebay cust svcs about my query...

Purchase 2 - I took a chance and did a direct debit to the vendor as I needed the item quickly/I did not understand the ins and outs of PayPal. All went smoothly and item arrived pronto!

Purchase 3 - Just completed today - did a UK maestro debit direct to my PayPal and it was instantaneous to pay into vendors PayPal account...item shipped immediately!

-----

I am thinking of selling small items from here - but to the UK market... (but would consider the local market if I thought I could sell English specialist books. The music I guess is international).
For these items I will use 'Offex' the UK postal system that has offices here. I have checked out the postal costs via this co - and it would be affordable for UK clients.
I do not see much of a market for my books here.


I have thought of buying from Spanish Ebay.. but would only use PayPal.

(I do not need to link my UK bank accounts & my Spanish - as I have an ATM card that gives the bank rate on the day - and charges no commission!).

Hoping it all works out!
As still a great learning curve with all the ins and outs -
2 in Spain - you mention the costs to the vendor? buyer? when payments are made with debit/credit cards?
Somehow I think my PayPal account was originally set up as a business account by my web designer - as I had a business at the time and I thought we might invoice UK clients this way.
Better check the tax man is not going to sting me!
;)

Update on my post above. The Ebay (uk) Echeque went terribly wrong. (finally it was cancelled and I sent a personal Q.. thankfully vendor was honest & I got my purchase).
Re my ATM card above (was nationwide Flex card) - they have pulled the plug on no commission for cash withdrawn abroad!

I looked on Ebay.es Although there are items listed for sale - I found many vendors were only placing an ad of 'items for sale' in the lineage ads and you had to send them an email to make contact. however, it seems most of the vendors use 'Paquete Azul' (cheap from Correos up to 10 kg and 1m sq!).. for quite reasonable amounts. (although it can take a while to be delivered)...
Not sure about payments...
Will look again.

Little tip if you are going to sell on ebay.co.uk to people in the UK

Use Offex Spain! they can send your items recorded delivery with a UK royal mail recognised tracking number!

If you Google "offex Spain" you will find them.