star reviews

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• Make It Mine (MIM) option – a price set by the seller at which he or she will close the auction and sell the item to willing buyers.
• No Reserve Auctions – No minimum price auctions, so you can get a real bargain if you’re the winner.
• Steals of the Week-Save on select products using Overstock.com coupons!

O-Lister 2.0 - Premier inventory management tool that lets you create and locally store auction listings to add to Overstock auctions, whenever you so choose!

• Various payment methods like PayPal, credit cards, and Auction Checkout
• Dozens of categories and hundreds of different auctions
• Easy-to-understand rating system for buyers and sellers
• Top Overstock featured searches
• Online auction references and guides
• My Homepage-make your own customized Overstock homepage
• OMuse-read and write about topics of interest such as ‘decorating’

Navigating the Overstock website:

We applaud Overstock on providing customers with such an intuitive and fluid website interface. Upon entry to the site, you can choose ‘Auctions’ from a tab, which directs you right to their resourceful and bustling auction page. Finding what you want in an Overstock auction is not too difficult, as you can enter the product name or browse through their selection by category.

If you’ve done a search, your results will show up in order of relevance, but you can change the organization by price, number of bids, time until closing, and more.  When you find a product you’re interested in, you simply click on it and you’ll be able to review information about the seller, including his or her feedback rating, and a description of the product. Links like ‘Customer Care’ and ‘Sell an Item’ are clearly displayed, as well.

Buying on Overstock:

After finding that item you simply cannot live without, in order to bid, just select ‘Place Bid’ from the product description page. You’ll need to sign in or register before placing your bid, however.  After you bid, you’ll be contacted by email (you must select this preference when you register) if you are outbid or if you are the winner of the auction. It is really that effortless.

Selling on Overstock:

In order to sell an item on Overstock, you must first sign up to become a member, which only takes a few minutes. You also have to enter credit card information in order to verify your identity, which may make some uncomfortable. But, realize that Overstock is a reputable and popular website for a reason. After verifying your new account, you can create listings with ease and have your items up for bids in no time at all. We appreciated how straightforward the whole process was.

Selection:

Overstock boasts a plethora of products in a wide array of categories, including real estate.  Two-acre open land in New Mexico, anyone? On a more serious note, their selection in some categories may be limited.  A search for the hard-to-find Wii video game console at eBay.com – the leading online auction service – delivered more than 14,000 results. 

Overstock, on the other hand, turned up only seven results.  A search for “diamond ring” at Ebay turned up more than 35,000 auctions, while the same search at Overstock retrieved 525 results. But, their unique and innovative auction categories all but make up for less listings than mega-giant eBay.

Buyer Protection:

Overstock participates in the buySafe program, where certain merchants are checked out thoroughly so that you can feel secure in purchasing products from them. If you buy an item through one of these merchants, you’ll be protected for up to $25,000 in case something goes wrong with your transaction.

Sellers of big ticket items can also be protected with Pay to Play.  With this feature, bidders are required to make a deposit on the item using their credit card.  If they lose the auction, the deposit is refunded. We admired Overstock’s commitment to buyer security.

Pricing:

Buyers can register, bid, and buy products through this online auction for free.  Sellers, on the other hand, are charged fees for listing and selling products.  An insertion fee and a reserve price fee are charged even if no bids are made on the listing.  The same is true for upgrade fees, but these are optional.  Auctions which do end successfully incur a closing fee.  The fee amounts are listed below:

• Insertion fee:  ranges from $0.10 to $3.15 depending on starting price for the item
• Reserve price fee:  ranges from $0.66 to $70 depending on the reserve price – these fees are refunded if winning bid matches or exceeds the reserve price
• Upgrade fees:  $0.10 to $13.17 depending on the chosen upgrade option
• Final Value fee:  at least 3% but depends on the final price of the product at the end of the auction

Customer Support:

Overstock provides customer support through their site’s help section, by email, and through live chat.  The help section does include 120 different questions and answers which do address most of the common issues buyers and sellers will face.  However, some of the answers aren’t clear enough to be sufficient.  When we contacted Overstock’s email support, we received an automated response promising an answer in two days and, as promised, we received a response in between 24 to 48 hours. 

Unfortunately, the automated answer only directed us back to the web site’s help section.  The live chat feature was also ineffective.  Although we were connected immediately to a representative, the representative was not able to answer our simple question about seller fees.  Instead, she simply gave us the email address we had already used to contact customer support.  When we attempted to email a transcript of the conversation to our inbox, the feature would not work properly.

Upside:

Protection for both buyers and sellers.  Easy to use.  Free shipping on some auctions. Obscure auctions.

Downside:

Email and live chat support were disappointing.  Not as great variety as eBay.

Summary:

Star Reviews enjoyed browsing through the Overstock website, as it was very user-friendly and all important links were clearly displayed. It was reminiscent of Amazon, so navigation will be simpler for fans of that site. We loved how many auctions you can bid on, as they range from your typical books and electronics to real estate and pottery. Talk about versatility. Of course, this like most online auctions pale in comparison to super popular eBay. But, Overstock definitely holds its own. Their Final Value fee was pretty average for most online auctions and we loved the O-Lister 2.0 software tool, which we felt could greatly assist you in selling items through Overstock. Customer support has room to improve, and we were a little shocked they didn’t provide a telephone number for those with questions. All in all, we recommend Overstock to seasoned buyers and sellers, or even those new to the game.