Review of eAhoy.comI wasted my time looking at eAhoy.com so you won't have to. The site has no buyers and only 36 sellers. 15 years ago this might have been a great site, but today it cannot compete with the established sites.
Here's a review of eAhoy features.Geogarages - This seems to be a fancy name for a store. A neat feature is the videos of items for sale in each geogarage. Or rather this would be a neat feature if the people actually spent some time shooting a video of the stuff they offer rather than waving their cell phones around for a while just to get a video they can use. I counted the total number of Geogarages and came up with 36. Some of the sellers have been registered users since before the site was launched - I found one with a register user since "31 Dec. 1969" notation -- so some of the sellers may be test accounts or the site owner's neighbors. In any event, the lack of sellers means few shoppers will be returning to eAhoy.com twice. Additionally, of the few sellers I checked on, none of them had any completed sales. After looking at the geogarages and sellers, I did searches for items as if I was a shopper. I got results from Amazon because eAhoy had no results. This is worse than worthless. While the site might be able to collect an affiliate commission from Amazon, this lowers the chances of repeat shoppers. I then read - actually skimmed through very quickly - the 29 page Terms of Service agreement provided by eAhoy to get an idea of the costs of a geogarage. The agreement spells everything out except how much it costs, and reads like it was written by a lawyer. The eAhoy developers probably spent more time on the user agreement than on the website. This seems evident based on the layout and look of the site. A click on the word shopping brings up an empty search results page. That's the most likely link a first time visitor will use. This means the path of a new site visitor will be:
That's what I would have done if I wasn't writing this review. Alexa stats confirm this by stating that the average user spends 68 seconds on the site and looks at 2 pages. Alexa also says that 59% of eAhoy's visitors only look at one page before leaving. I was only able to find out the costs of using Eahoy.com by creating an account. Here's the cost of eahoy:
There are also additional costs for listing options. I listed a few items on eahoy.com to see the whole process. Extra costs are second category for $1.00, featured for $9.95, highlight for a buck, or bold for 50 cents. Oddly you can only have four images, and they must be hosted by eahoy.com. The image system works like Craigslist's, but you can only upload one image at a time. Images are free. If eahoy had traffic any of these would be a great deal. Tias charges 10% commissions with a $34.95 or $39.95 monthly minimum depending on payment plan. Based on my fees and conversations with my students, eBay fees tend to run between 5 and 9% with the majority of sellers paying on the higher end. Both Tias and eBay have higher fees than eahoy. But remember, eahoy has no buyers. How about Craigslist? When I first looked at eahoy, I thought it might be a good place to run ads to buy collectibles. I run ads on Craigslist, but they are frequently flagged and removed. Turns out you cannot run wanted ads on eahoy.com, so that's not an option. Craigslist is free though. That's a big advantage. Craigslist also has something else that makes it a better option than eahoy. Buyers! While looking at the site the phrase 'Income Opportunity' is shown frequently. Clicking on the link leads to the eahoy affiliate or partner program. The offer of a 30% commission for referring new sellers might get some unscrupulous people to recommend them, but the site as it sits has no value. If you have someone telling you to sign up, you should be wary of his other advice. Overall, eahoy could be a great site, but will probably never get the traffic it needs to attract either buyers or sellers. The site will not attract repeat shoppers without sellers, and will not attract sellers without buyers.
eAhoy - The Community Driven Marketplace
Note: I'd have given eahoy 0 stars, but the system will not accept a value below 1.
Reviewed by Terry Gibbs. Rated: 1/ 5
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