With ebay raising fees at every turn, for every reason, and in every facet of operation, many online merchants and individual sellers are constantly searching for an effective and cheaper venue to sell their wares. Dozens of sites have appeared, taken their shot and either been bought up by ebay or folded.

Currently their are two new venues ascending to popular status, both of which seem poised for their own reasons, to take a bite out of ebay's monopoly.

Onlineauction.com or OLA.com is a community driven online auction marketplace which seems to be really focused on affordable, safe and effective online person to person auctions. Founder Chris Fain has posted on the home page, the OLA Declaration of Cyber Independence. As of August 11th, 2008 OLA boast over 16 million listings and is offering an entry level Founding Member Program. The way that OLA seems to plan on avoiding the pitfalls of shareholder expectations is by offering a Founding Membership to the first one million people who choose to purchase it. For $196 you will recieve Unlimited Listings for 12 months with no final value fees and no listing fees, a Free CD "Buying and Selling Online", a fun pack which includes a photo editor and more, a founding member icon on every auction listing page, to encourage and assure potential buyers that you are a trustworthy and honest seller. They also are throwing in $200 in auction enhancements to help place your auctions on front pages across OLA, and with your founding membership you are guaranteed a yearly renewal rate of $96 for unlimited listing.

If you are not prepared to invest the $196, then a basic sellers package can be had for only $8 a month, which includes no listing or relisting fees, no final value fees, freedom to post personal website information in each listing,and true competive listing, where the highest bidder wins!

The second new platform, which has been featured prominently in national media, including Fox News, is Wigix.

Still currently in the beta stage, Wigix is founded on the idea that anything can be sold, if it is placed on the right platform. The Wigix platform allows buy and sell orders to be placed in parallel to one another, which puts buyers and sellers in direct alignment, encouraging a sort of stock market type of auction. The wigix platform depends entirely on paypal for its financial transactions. Some of you are probably thinking, great! Another feebay. But Wigix has established a flat rate tiered fee structure in which you will not be charged for listings, and a small flat rate for items in three dollar tiers. The total of Wigix final value fees will be just a fraction of ebay FVF's, with no forecast for fee hikes in the future.

Another neat feature Wigix offers is an "Item Expert' platform, in which a user, defined as an expert on any particular item, can earn 5% of all revenue generated by the particular item. This is Wigix strategy to use it's community to help it build a strong catalog of products.

Online sellers should check both of these sites out, both show promise, vision, and the ability to hold out when feebay comes knocking, checkbook in hand.