If you are looking for additional ways to sell your products outside of your main web site, there are alternative marketing and sales channels to consider. While eBay is currently the 800 pound gorilla in this arena, it is not the only marketing channel available for small web site owners. Check out this list of sites offering both auctions and fixed price alternatives for Internet marketers.

Alternate channels are great ways to sell merchandise that is slow-moving, obsolete, returned or overstocked. When using auctions to sell your products, you may not always get the same price for a product that you would receive if you sold it on your web site, but when inventory is not moving or you have a cash flow problem, cash in hand is usually better than cash tied up in inventory. When selling returned mechandise, make sure that it is in perfect working condition or you will not last long trying to sell products on auction sites.

uBid.com caters to both the B2B and B2C markets. They feature new, close-out, overstock and refurbished merchandise using auctions and fixed price formats. The interesting part of uBid’s auctions is that you can see the entire bidding history and bid prices displayed near the bottom of the auction pages.

Bidville.com was purchased by UBid in July of 2006. Bidville is a simple-looking site that offers an auction format that is very similar to that of eBay. Bidville started out in 1999 as an auction site focused on selling sport card collectibles. In 2003, they expanded their product categories to focus more directly on competing with eBay. Like eBay, they offer both online auctions and storefronts.

Wagglepop.com launched in early 2006 and quickly shut down due to reasons that were not made public. They are up and runing again and may be worth investigating. They charge a flat fee of $9.95 per month for a storefront, plus insertion fees and selling price fees.

We recently stumbled upon Etsy.com, which is a site focused on the arts and crafts market. It is not an auction site; it offers a fixed price format for those wishing to sell handmade goods. Etsy reports over 300,000 registered members with over 50,000 sellers.

eCrater is another site that we found in our research. It appears to have a relatively small but loyal following of registered users. eCrater describes their site as both a free web store builder and a free online marketplace. That means that you can list and sell products on the site for free. When sellers register with eCRATER they receive free customizable storefronts. Products are listed in Froogle (Google’s marketplace for products). There are fees involved if you want to reserve a premium position for selling products at the top of a category or on the home page, but it looks like that is it. Could be worth further investigation.