Cart Shark: Wigix offers alternative to eBay

There is something about eBay that inspires a deep and visceral hatred among a rising tide of online buyers and sellers.

If you’re unfamiliar with the auction site’s many detractors, just Google the phrase “hate eBay” and you’ll get the picture. (At first, the profanity is jarring; I found hearing it in my head in the voice of William Shatner to be neutralizing).

With numerous ill-wishers among eBay’s buying and selling minions — most of them harshing on fee hikes, padded shipping charges, fraud, scams, and so on — it’s little wonder new sites aiming for a piece of the online auction pie are cropping up almost daily.

True, many of these alternatives are short-lived ventures, often with only a few hundred auction listings at any one time. They tend to vaporize once their operators confront the magnitude of regulating and managing a live, online marketplace. Those that have a shot at contender status are often built on a loss-leader model, with free auction listings geared toward building critical mass, only to scare away users when commissions and other fees are later introduced.

Still, rivals persist: At last count I’d visited some 75 auction sites trying to give eBay a run for its money. Spokane’s own Epier.com has managed to stick it out since launching eight years ago; despite slower-than-anticipated growth, the no-cost listing site boasts more than 100,000 registered users.

Enter Wigix.com, an online marketplace offering what you might call the brand-name Yin to Etsy’s craft-chic Yang.

Based on a Nasdaq-style pricing-matching model, the so-called “Want it, got it Xchange” offers mostly mass-produced goods. Sellers don’t even need to write descriptions for their items, choosing instead from a prefab list in the Wigix database.

Wigix lets sellers and buyers state their desired price for specific items, then alerts them when a match is made. Wigix buyers are charged a $1.50 fee with each purchase, while sellers are charged a percentage depending on the price of the item sold.

Touting policies that include no listing fees, no fees on the sale of items under $25, no hidden charges, and no fees for unsold items, Wigix is likely to attract jilted eBay sellers on the rebound.

And with more than 450,000 items in the Wigix catalog, buyers have little to complain about. Wigix tracks both time and sales data for each item in its marketplace, enabling buyers and sellers to get detailed data on market prices.

Wigix also weaves social networking technologies into its marketplace to enable collectors, traders, owners and friends to interact with each other. Both buyers and sellers can earn extra cash by helping expand the Wigix catalogue, referring friends, or by sharing knowledge of a particular commodity as a “category expert.”

Currently offered in a public beta, Wigix plans to introduce additional features in the near future, including improved safety and security for users. If nothing else, sellers can use Wigix as a no-cost means to keep eBay honest – and hopefully their dirty words to themselves.