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Can Ebay be beaten?
Beaten in a sense of deprived of business or market share. The common wisdom is they are here to stay. I can imagine that if, say, Yahoo! was to significantly cut their Yahoo! Auction fees, or even make Auction site totally free (making it similar to Froogle that lives only off of the advertisers money), even then there is going to be a question of whether the seller will come to Y! Auctions in their mass, or not, cause if the sellers still think the buyers are few on Y! Auctions and plenty on Ebay, they could pay the fees and still make money.
Okay, so how about even goingn further to give seller an initial incentive to come to Y!Auctions, will they come? Depends on incentive I guess but why would we be undermining such a wonderful company that we can work with together? Rather, we sign them up as advertisers and get referral comissions.
I also acknowledge that Ebay has a fantastic model, where the users/sellers and buyer do all the job, they just have to collect comissions. Doing the job involves the whole process of listing the item, that includes its categorization (and this further improves search relevance), buying the item and the following transaction. Awesome online marrketplace.
What about Yahoo! Shopping in this context? Well, simply check if you cannot get the same item their cheaper, chances are you will. And in any case, it would be a good exercise before you bid to know how much the item costs in the wild.
Lastly, Yahoo! Japan in which Yahoo! USA has a large stake, own the Auction business in Japan which is as profitable and popular as Ebay in the US, good for us.
Shop for Ebay books and products on Amazon!
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