Slashdot Mirror
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/
Anymore if I happen to hop on eBay, all I see are hundreds (if not thousands) of the same HOT TICKET, LIMITED AVAIL, CANT FIND THIS ANYWHERE regurgitated items being sold over and over again to the public and over-inflated prices (dont even get me started on shipping at ebay).
It's less and less a viable place to do business, as a consumer or a retailer, as the site is flooded with the same crap, mostly imitations, be hawked as hard to find, rare items that are actually useless junk. I don't even want to start talking about all the dam *FAKE* items out there, where you can buy INFORMATION leading to a purchase...
I'm done with you eBay.
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
Oh, wait...
Since its not in the headline:
https://www.codebase.ebay.com
all of this sniping nonsense just proves how ridiculous people treat an auction like ebay (which usually leads them to grossly overpay).
While a good number of people do indeed overbid because they get drawn into the competitive spirit of winning the auction, there's a simple reason why sniping is still effective: savings. Sure, you can enter your maximum bid straight away. But there's also the psychological advantage of deferring your bid until the end, for items with no bids on them. As a simple example, let's say that I see some widget for which I would pay up to $20. I place that $20 max bid right away, starting at $1. Somebody else sees that there's action on the item, and places their max bid at, say, $10. Instantly the bids increase to $11. Is that someone else going to get caught up in the action and bid $21 or more? Possibly, and in that case, I simply walk away because my max was exceeded. Or I could win it at $11. Or at $12. Or up to $20. Whatever.
On the other hand, I know that a great majority of eBay bidders are into sniping themselves. If there's no bids on that widget with only 30 seconds to go, that other person might try to snipe it for $5. Having sold a few items, and bought quite a few more, I know that the most activity usually comes in the last minute, and usually for fairly low amounts. Me, I'll be entering my $20 maximum in the last 10 seconds. In this case, I'll walk away with my widget for a paltry $6 after bids. I seldom get outbid by someone who has the same strategy as this -- everyone else puts in a low bid, and maybe one more marginally higher bid before the time expires.
Sure, this is all relatively unknown info -- there's no guarantee there will be another bidder, there's no knowledge of what the bids will be, etc. But it's a pretty good approximation of how a lot of eBayers purchase items, so I'll try to use that past behaviour against them to get me the best bang for my buck.
The only way bidding before-hand benefits you is if a second last-minute sniper enters the same or a lower amount as you have previously bid. If you enter your max right at the last minute, you're guaranteed to get the same results as early bidding, but with a greater potential to save a few bucks.
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
Was I the only one who read the headline and then tried to recall who EBay was sueing?
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.