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EBay Drops Charges for Developers Network
Rob writes "Seeking to make its presence in third-party rebranded commerce applications more ubiquitous, eBay Inc is lifting all of its API and transaction charges for developers. It's the latest action a series of moves to expand the eBay developer community. Last summer, the company opened up a collaborative website, the eBay Community Codebase, to provide a hosted project developer site for anyone willing to open source their code."
This is a huge plus for everyone involved. Much of eBay's usefulness as a remotely accessible database resource has been nullified due to these annoying charges. Without having a fee associated with access to their very own information, eBay is really opening up for third party developers to generate decent applications, rather than hav eto depend on scraping the HTML to get functionality. I've used JBidWatcher a lot for sniping, which relies on HTML scraping, and I'm glad we can move away from that.
And before folks start going on about sniping, eBays very own policies make sniping the -only- way to do business on ebay with any effectiveness. Becaused they won't implement the simple policy of extending an auction based on most recent bid (a very simple solution to the problem of sniping, and one that would be an elegant, simple, and beneficial solution to eveyrone), sniping is now 'de rigeur' for any auction.
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
I seem to remember reading somewhere last week that Google was thinking about opening their own E-Bay similar marketplace (a move deserving of FARK's "obvious" tag). I wonder how much of the decision to open the API has to do with the fact that Google will certainly open theirs when it gets up and running.
Do I still have to get my app "approved"?
I'm not going to waste my time testing my app with their engineers, regardless of whether its free or not.
Their API restrictions and fees were such a turnoff that I no longer care about them anymore. I will circumvent them as long as possible.
Yeah I don't buy on eBay anymore. Last time I used it, several years ago, it was definately a seller's market. Items were going for prices that were *higher* than regular online retail. So, a great place to sell something, but not a great place to buy something.
That said, eBay can be a good resource if you know specifically what you're looking for. That way you can specify a good search and not be hit with so much clutter.
I wish they'd make a "private seller only" version of eBay. None of this ebay merchant crap. When I use eBay it's to find second hand goods from real people at fair prices....not new stuff at retail prices from shady businesses.
I've been using eBay since it's inception and watched it go from a site for collectors to a dumping ground for overstocked/bulk items. What they really need to do is crackdown on sellers like this prick who insists on crap flooding entire catagories with the same item instead of using the bulk option.
Ever heard of Buy It Now? You don't have to wait. Also, if you have special interests (crafts and hobbies, exotic computer equipment) eBay is sometimes the only place you can find certain items. So maybe you have no use for eBay but other people do, and they don't need to be cash poor or time rich to make it so.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
If not..... <YAWN>.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Because Google has been rumoured to be releasing an eBay competitor, as well as a PayPal competitor into the marketplace. Combining their ad program with a simple and easy to use auction site can only increase their ad revenue because of the way the content is generated and who's viewing -- all by end users. Thus the AdSense program can adopt and learn market behaviors, as well as track buying habits, and only create more targetted ads.
And since Google has released damn near everything (tm) for free -- including Picasa, WiFi, and today the Web Analyitics tools (which are awesome by the way) -- eBay is going to have to make their preemptive move against a Google entry. Google's name recognition and sheer dollar value will allow them to muscle their way into the market on this. But developers know that Google's API is lacking, especially compared to Yahoo and others, and eBay is already trying to capitalize.
Either way, I look at this as a precursor for eBay to lower their auction rates and PayPal rates. Win-win for me. If Google does release what they are 'rumoured' to, then there's only more competition for my money and since I have good history with both companies, the lower price will probably win.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Instead, they follow one of the following models:
- The emotional bidder: Bidding is war to this person. He bids and each time he is outbid he bids some more. He gets so caught up in the bidding that he doesn't realize he's paying 150% of retail for a used item and 200% of what he thought he was willing to spend on the item at all.
- The minimum bidder: This person bids the minimum, gets outbid by the proxy system, bids the minimum again, and again, and again... then gives up. This drives up the price of the item unnecessarily, because the bidder was never serious to begin with.
However, the biggest advantage to sniping has nothing to do with other bidders at all.Sniping helps deal with this problem by not allowing an emotional bidder to raise his bid once he is outbid. If he had truly entered his max bid like he was supposed to, and if his max bid is more than my snipe, then he's winning the auction anyway. But if he failed to correctly identify his max bid and my snipe is higher than what he entered, then I win and he can't get emotional about it. He should have bid properly to begin with.
Sniping helps deal with this problem by not revealing my bid until it is too late for the minimum bidder to do his minimum bid cycle. He should have bid properly and entered his maximum bid into ebay, if he wanted to win. Instead, he just raises the price for me, which is not preferable.
Let's say that I want to buy a commodity item like a 1GB SD memory card. There are many auctions for such an item, which retails for about $60. Let's assume that I want to pay no more than $40 (~35% discount), but most auctions close for $45-50. Realize that there are hundreds and hundreds of auctions for 1GB SD cards, most of them end within one or two minutes of each other.
How do you expect me to get my $40 SD card? I can't bid on one auction with 3 hours to go because I'll miss hundreds of auctions that close before the one that I bid on. And I can't bid on any of those hundreds of auctions that close earlier, because how will I know if I won the first auction? It hasn't closed yet! And I certainly do not need 2 SD cards. Just one. I can't even bid on an auction that closes in 10 minutes for the same problem.
With sniping software, I group all the 1GB SD card auctions together, give it a maximum price including shipping, and then let it bid for me in the final seconds. It can see whether I won or not and if I won, it will quit bidding. If I lost, it will bid on the next one, and the next one, and the next one... until I win or realize that my price is too low and bump it up.
I'm sorry if you think that I should sit in front of the ebay website all day and compulsively bid on each SD card auction, but I'm too busy compulsively hitting reload on the slashdot homepage, trying to get the coveted first post.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
A friend of mine got jacked for $4000 trying to buy a PowerMac and various accessories. The seller had spent 15 months building up a huge positive feedback (and she WASN'T scamming, but actually selling real items to real buyers!), then decided to "cash out" and skip town. She ripped off over a dozen people to the tune of about $250,000.
Unfortunately, she wasn't that good at hiding, and she got caught. She got a suspended sentence and was ordered to pay back the cash, which has never happened. Almost four years later and my friend still hasn't seen a dime of the 4 grand.
What baffles me is that this seller was running a successful eBay business and actually making a profit! Instead of scaling up her business and making a legitimate killing, she decided to steal people's money. Even if she'd gotten away with it, it is unlikely she could have repeated the performance without somehow giving herself away. It just doesn't make any sense. Some people just suck.