User Base:  

Bid-Alot offers the typical selection of auction categories and no adult or mature section, maintaining that they are a family friendly auction site. Unfortunately, their user base is tremendously small. We found the average number of auctions to be only about 1,000 and most of the auctions consistently had no bids.

Fees:  

Registration at Bid-Alot costs $2 a month, which allows users to then list items with no additional fees and no final value fees.

Attention getters are limited, but include using bold or highlighted listings for $2 apiece and having your item featured by category for $5.

Selling:  

Bid-Alot implements a variety of useful tools for sellers, but again, probably doesn’t get enough traffic to make it a great venue for selling. Sellers can sell multiple items in a Dutch auction, open a store, and cross promote items. Sellers can even have private auctions.

Buying:  

Searching and bidding at Bid-Alot are not difficult, but not as simple as they could be. Several of the featured auctions don’t even have thumbnail images. Opening up the front page and finding five of the six featured items with “No Image Available” prominently displayed was pretty annoying. The listing gallery uses small pictures, but is otherwise decent.

Reliability/Security:  

Bid-Alot allows users to leave feedback on their auction experiences. A unique feature is the user blogs. Members can create blogs and post messages about their latest sales, newest items, or anything else.

Help/Support:  

We found Bid-Alot.com’s largest downfall to be their help section. The FAQs section and knowledgebase are difficult to navigate and sparse in information. Many of the questions are not adequately answered. Although the video tutorials are informative, they do not give the user the option to read the material at their own pace. We also found that the live chat feature was rarely active.

Bid-Alot is not a good eBay alternative. The features are decent, but lacking, and the user base is pretty much nonexistent. Don’t expect to find or sell much on Bid-Alot.com.

For a more complete online auction service, see our review of eBay. Or if you're looking for an eBay alternative, see our reviews of eBid and OnlineAuction.