In case you hadn't noticed, there's been a bit of a revolt among eBay power sellers. Basically, eBay increased some fees, which led some buyers to hold a boycott. But the truth of the matter is eBay is a giant, and if you make a decent portion of your income buying and selling goods on eBay, there aren't a ton of good alternatives. Wigix wants to change that, and the site is willing to waive fees on all items sold for less than $25 to do it. For pricier items, WIgix has significantly lower transaction fees than you'll find on eBay.
Wigix isn't exactly an auction like eBay. Rather, it's an "exchange," which lets buyers and sellers connect with one another. Sellers don't have to fill out product descriptions manually. Instead they choose from a database of products which already have product descriptions. This database also makes the search process easy for buyers. When you start to enter a term in the search box, Wigix will provide a list of items to chose from before you even hit enter. When you find the item you're looking for, you can see how many buyers and sellers there are, and you can set a price at which you're wiling to buy an item. As soon as the item is available for that price, Wigix will hook you up with a seller.
You can conduct similar transactions with eBay's Half.com, which lets you "pre-order" an item which will automatically be purchased as soon as someone offers one for sale at your desired price. But Half.com only includes books, movies, music, and video games, while Wigix users can sell pretty much anything.
A few weeks ago eBay announced plans to change its fee structure. The company was spinning the move as something that would help sellers save money. But that only worked out to be true in some instances. Since eBay planned to lower listing fees but raise final sale fees, most sellers were a bit concerned that they'd wind up giving eBay a higher percentage of their hard earned cash.
Responding to concerns from sellers, eBay has announced yet another fee structure change. This time, the listing fees for media including books, music, movies, and video games will go way down. The price for listing an item with a starting price less than a buck drops from $0.20 to $0.10. Sellers with starting bids of less than $10 will now be charged $0.25 instead of $0.40. And if you've got an item with a starting bid of under $25, you pay $0.35 instead of $0.60.
Since eBay is still raising the fees on final sales, in most cases sellers will still wind up paying owing eBay a little more. But today's announcement softens the blow. A little.
Want to sell some old junk lying around the house on eBay, but don't feel like putting up with listing fees? The company has announced plans to cut listing fees by up to 50 percent.
The cuts aren't across the board. In fact, some fees will be raised. For example, if your items sells for less than $25, you'll now be charged 8.75%, which is a 67% increase.
The new fees take effect on February 20th and are aimed at the US, although eBay plans to announce rate changes in the uK and Germany soon. The move comes at a time when eBay is struggling with flattening growth and competition from other online auction sites.
Do you still use eBay to buy and sell new and used items? Or have you started turning to other auction sites? What do you think of eBay's current listing and transaction fees?
Not that this should surprise anybody, but Google has officially announced plans to participate in the upcoming FCC wireless spectrum auction.
The 700 MHz auction that is part of the transition to digital television begins January 24th, and will be part of a shift for a more efficient wireless internet service.
Om Malik has pointed out that Google believes this is a winning situation for consumers no matter who wins out, but for some reason they are not hard pressed to win. Could it be a move to drive up bidding prices from the likes of AT&T and Verizon? Or is it truly on their wish list to save the world and make a few extra billion while they are at it?
Remember when Yahoo Auctions folded up shop? Like many, we here at Download Squad were more than a little disappointed, but we absolutely understood that eBay had become a juggernaut, and competing with the world's biggest auction site was a losing proposition for Yahoo. Even uBid, arguably the second-most-significant auction site, can't touch eBay in terms of volume.
Naturally, we were surprised to hear about a couple of guys from the Chicago area that decided to build their own miniature eBay using yard sales as their selling gimmick. The result? A group of sites that allow their user community to sell and buy on a local basis. Napervilleyardsales.com supports a garage sale community in an upscale Chicago suburb, while sister-site Jolietyardsales.com (which looks nearly identical) offers the same service a few miles up the road.
At first blush, we wondered, why wouldn't people just use eBay? Then it made sense--between eBay's per-item listing fees, commission percentage, and large geographic reach, eBay may not actually be the right answer for the localized selling that gives yard sales their unique charm.
The guys that run these yard sale sites have six or seven of them up and running, and they don't cross list items between the sites, so they really are local-only listings. A far cry from eBay. Who knows if these yard sale web site guys are actually turning a profit, but it stands to reason, if you keep things local and build enough of these sites, maybe you can still compete against the world's biggest site for "selling your old junk".
Every time you search for an item on eBay, you can be sure that hundreds or thousands of people are looking for the exact same thing. And that's why you rarely get that super bargain you're hoping for when buying a used computer or fishing rod.
TypoTracker aims to give you an edge by letting you search eBay for common misspellings. Just type your search term, and TypoTracker will generate a list of possible typos. Click the search button and hunt for bargains.
More often than not the service is almost, but not quite useful. For example, if you're looking for a Sharp Zuarus Linux PDA, TypoTracker will search for "saurus," bringing up dozens of listings for plush dinosaur toys. Or if you're looking for items that are sold with "buy it now" prices, the seller won't discount the item just because she or he misspelled an item in the product description.
What happens when you mashup Google Maps with eBay? You get this hideous creation. So it's not the best designed mashup we have seen, in fact its pretty crude, but Visual eBay does provide a little visual glimpse into the world of eBay auctions.
This mashup pinpoints the exact locations that auctions are taking place in. Search for a keyword under a category and choose either the U.S., Canada, Australia or England, and Visual eBay pinpoints the locations on a Google Map. There is also a Google Gadget for Visual eBay that can be placed on your iGoogle homepage.
Visual eBay seemed to be a little buggy for us when trying it out.
Last year eBay entered into an advertising agreement with Yahoo, part of that agreement was to build a co-branded toolbar. It's now available.
The new eBay toolbar uses both Yahoo and eBay features to power it. With it users can search for items on eBay or Half.com, and search with Yahoo using Yahoo Local, Yahoo Video and Yahoo Answers among others. The toolbar also has one click access to Yahoo Mail, and gives direct access to eBay.com. Complete with account guard to protect auction accounts and eBay auction Alerts.
The eBay toolbar featuring Yahoo is currently available for Internet Explorer Windows users only, with a Firefox version in development.
Surfing and buying online just got a little better with Mozilla and eBay. The two companies have just released a special eBay targeted version of the Firefox browser with the little help of an Addon.
The new Mozilla Firefox eBay edition has a few add-ons that make this browser unique:
Real time updates on bidding with a sidebar
Status alerts
eBay specific search
eBay account guard support
eBays goal with this partnership is to ensure bidders are always securely signed in, so users can stay on top of bids and actions with little effort. They also want users to always have eBay activities available on screen within a quick glance for notifications of immediate updates.
The new version is ready to download, and available here.
Everyone knows its America's number one pastime, and now Google has announced their entrance into the TV ad market.
There has been a lot of speculation recently surrounding the fact that Google's been nosing around the TV market to extend their offline ad experimentations, and it was just a matter of time before the news officially dropped. With this new TV Ad trial, Google hopes to improve user experiences and bring value to both advertisers and publishers. They are currently working with EchoStar and Astound Cable to deliver ads to viewers, as well as helping advertisers and programmers buy, schedule, deliver and of course measure ads on television. We also dropped news this morning about how Google and Dish Networks will be announcing a deal to serve ads over their network.
The ads will be purchased through an automated interface auction model, pricing based on a CPM basis with ads then targeted by demographic, time of day and channel. The ads will be delivered with all reporting and statistics done through set top box technologies. The boxes will report on how many times an ad was viewed and whether it was watched in completion.
So needless to say, if more advertisers buy into Google's technology and take the statistics into consideration when planning campaigns, we might never see boring, useless commercials ever again! Then again, it sure does feel a little like big brother is watching us.
eBay is set to display Google Ads, in a deal that will specifically utilize Google's "click-to-call" ads linking up shoppers with merchants.
eBay and Google made the announcements Monday, with both companies aiming at complementing each others strengths. Google will be the sole provider of text-based ads found on eBay. In the deal, eBay will be working closer with Google to optimize its online ads. In an effort to streamline the process of connecting shoppers with auction listings. The click-to-call ads that Google has developed, leveraging both Google and Skype's functionality in auctions to bring buyers and merchants or advertisers in touch directly.
The Google, eBay deal will start testing in early 2007. On a side note, I have personally noticed quite a bit more eBay results in Google search queries within the past month. I'm not sure if there has been some early testing going on, but it looks like eBay, and eBay auctioneers are working on some better Search Engine Optimization techniques.
The eBay auction for Kiko, the Web 2.0 calendar app that we reported was on the block last week, has ended. The final price was $258,100, offered by an eBay user called powerjoe1998, who will take home all rights to the Kiko software, web site, and domain name. Kiko team member Richard White has penned a very interesting post-mortem on the details of the service's demise which is a must-read for potential Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. Currently there's no word on what Kiko's new owner's plans are for the service.
Digg user 'Geekforlife' has decided to put his profile, ranked 73rd out of all users, up for auction on eBay. Amidst accusations hurling at both Digg and Netscape for their respective approaches towards the social news site and business models, one of the many debates that has arisen centers around a question: can the participation of these sites' users (especially the top contributors) be measured in dollars and cents? Jason Calacanis (disclosure: our CEO and general manager of the new Netscape) certainly thinks so, as do plenty of other bloggers, such as Ian Betteridge.
Understandably, not everyone is happy with the concept of monetary incentives being inserted into the realm of grassroots social news aggregating, but 'Geekforlife' has apparently been inspired to try out his own take on the situation with this auction. As of this writing, bidding (possibly due to fraud/inflation) is already up to $325 after 27 bids. I guess time will tell as to what, if anything, this little experiment could mean to the social news universe.
According to Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion, eBay is going for a Web 2.0 trifecta and working on bringing blogs, wikis, and tagging to its auction sellers. Blogs and wikis will be launched at the eBay Live conference later this month and serve a variety of purposes, such as enhancing a store or discussing collectibles. Blogs will be free and each eBay Blog will have a URL like http://blogs.ebay.com/userID. Bloggers can specify "search tags" which are essentially keywords that will help blogs on a particular topic, e.g. Coke memorabilia, show up on relevant eBay searches. And of course, eBay blogs will include RSS feeds. More information on the upcoming features can be found in eBay's help pages: About eBay Blogs and About the eBay Wiki.
Reuters is reporting that eBay and Yahoo! have struck up a partnership to strengthen their positions against Microsoft and Google. The deal includes integration between several of the companies' services. The Yahoo! Publisher Network will now be the exclusive third-party provider of graphic ads on eBay, Yahoo! will use PayPal (owned by eBay) to allow users to pay for its various services, and the eBay toolbar will now be co-branded and include Yahoo! search features. The deal fuels recent speculation of an impending merger between the two companies.
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