Northumberland, UK - A SURVEY of eBay and QXL in UK and France, gave conclusive results.
A chance read on a message board about the demise of QXL Ricardo, the dotcom disaster, threw up an interesting snippet: QXL may be rubbish in the UK, but it's doing rather well in France.
We undertook a search for a basket of items comprising a statue, fireplace, beams, chandelier, and wood flooring on eBay.co.uk, eBay.fr, QXL.com and QXL.fr. The results seem conclusive.
The total of lots found with these keywrods were 348 on eBay.co.uk, 104 on eBay.fr, 8 on QXL.com and 389 on QXL.fr. By comparison SalvoWEB's basket found was 130, but there were no ceramic dolls or pictures torn out of old books on SalvoWEB. Like for like, SalvoWEB seems better than both eBay and QXL for most architectural and garden items, and much better on reclaimed building materials.
QXL Ricardo, launched in 1999 with a share price of 75p, rising to over 700p in early 2000 valuing the company at £2.2bn, and falling to 0.6p now which values the company at under £5m. Its losses are still more than its turnover and its cash reserves have now gone.
