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Students Embarrass eBay With Firefox Add-On
An anonymous reader sends along a posting from the Grooveking blog on a group of Stanford students who got together to help promote Firefox and ended up releasing a long overdue eBay Toolbar for Firefox before Mozilla and eBay could release their jointly developed extension in Europe. Mozilla's COO said the preemptive release of the eBay Toolbar had ruffled some feathers among European eBay execs. "Besides basic search features, it removes external ads on the site and allows users to see thumbnail pictures on ALL search items, even those sellers didn't pay for. An eBay toolbar has been long overdue... eBay can't be too enthusiastic about this toolbar since it cuts directly into its main sources of revenue: ads and thumbnail fees. But eBay users get a really good deal."
Certainly reinforces the Spread Firefox group's original slogan: Take Back the Web.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Why is this such a big deal? It's a lot easier for a bunch of student programmers like this to release a toolbar than it is for eBay.
The problem isn't making the plugin. That's relatively easy. I guarentee is doesn't take eBay very long to make a toolbar for their own site, assuming they have programmers that are a least a bit competent.
No, the problem is testing. If an offical toolbar from eBay causes even the smallest problem, eBay is on the hook. For a bunch of students this isn't a problem.
Just installed it and started typing in their personal information, with absolutely no idea what this plugin was doing with it?
Uh huh. Oh, now you're thinking through the security implications.
It's probably not a particularly clever piece of phishing, but the next one might be.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
That is why Ebay have not finished their own toolbar yet. They were too busy trying to figure out how to code the bar without messing up their revenue streams. Had they have just made the bar functional and user friendly, they might have already finished it. Fortunately for everyone else, the Stanford group was only concerned about a functional, working toolbar.
... but it should be mentioned that they could create it that fast only thanks to breaking 173 Microsoft patents.
839*929
Or was the problem trying to figure out a way to implement it that increased ad revenues?
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
A couple guys who want to do something they think is cool turned out to be faster at it than a couple corporations trying to do something to monetize what they perceive as something users want.
Let me put on my surprised face.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
They've done more than embarrass eBay. They both released their plugin first, and done it "better" from a customer standpoint by bypassing ads and including all pictures. eBay cannot simply release their plugin now, as informed users are going to pick the one that has a better UI (one without ads and with more pictures). They also cannot simply change their site functionality to break the student plugin, as they'll alienate customers who are using it. Even if they did that quickly to minimise market penetration it would only be a temporary solution, as any changes will likely be worked around quickly. They'd back to the problem of competing with a plugin that has no ads and better functionality.
Sounds kind of like DRM CDs vs. digital format music. You don't have to be a lawyer to figure out if the customer prefers better functionality. Let's hope eBay takes a different approach than the recording industry has. I'm not optimistic.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
They're allowed to charge whatever they feel like in much the same way that I'm allowed to be a total asshole. Yeah, it's allowed in a free society, but that doesn't make it good or smart.
Trying to maximize profits at the detriment of your own customers is common practice, and that's largely why so many things are completely screwed up. The world would be better if people were willing to settle for an honest buck, a modest profit, instead of screwing over everyone as far as they're allowed with no consideration for the ramifications.
It's so easy to end up with retaliatory negatives from sellers when you use your account for both buying and selling.
And I give good feedback when the transaction sucked and I'm a buyer because no seller leaves feedback until the buyer does. It's blackmail. I paid you within 30 seconds of the close of the auction. You should give me feedback then, the transaction is done, as far as you are concerned. But no, I don't get any feedback until I've left feedback. If the damn thing takes 6 weeks to get here, I have the choice of telling the world that the transaction sucked (and I get negative retaliatory feedback when I've done nothing wrong), or I give good feedback or no feedback to protect my own feedback ratio.
eBay purposefully slants such things toward the seller, because those are the people that pay the fees. eBay could come up with all sorts of ways to prevent retaliation. If I'm a buyer, I've paid (verified by my paypal account that eBay saw the payment flow through) then the seller can't give me negative/neutral feedback once I give feedback. If I did something wrong, they'll know it long before the item arrives at my house. To accept my payment and wait to see what I leave for feedback before leaving their own is blackmail and makes the feedback system mostly useless.
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Excepting of course that the free market is a harsh mistress and in an idealized environment does not tolerate large profit margins. If there are large profit margins it means that a competitor should start up with lower profits. Absent such natural checks and balances capitalism would be a disaster for most people. Unfortunately frequently the checks and balances aren't actually present. The free market isn't ideal: Consumers aren't entirely rational, information is frequently withheld, participants commit fraud, governments meddle, and sometimes natural monopolies form. When the market is distorted in such a way, one can no longer reasonably hold that the prices are necessarily reasonable and should be accepted without question.
eBay might be such an example. Thanks to the network effect, eBay is enjoying a very natural monopoly. If a seller jumps to another service, they look 90% or more of their potential buyers, dramatically reducing effective demand for their product and lowering their own profits. As a result the sellers generally don't leave. Given so few sellers, buyers have little incentive to jump services, creating a feedback loop.
Given this overwhelming cost to jumping services, there is no realistic competition. Absent competition, eBay can afford to jack prices and generate large profit margins with no real risk.
I don't know if eBay really is gouging, if regulation (the typical solution) is needed, and if so what sort of regulation we should enact, but it is definitely within the realm of possibility. You can't simply wave around supply-and-demand like it's a magical wand that magically makes everything good.
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"Oh you don't? They why do you begrudge Ebay charging what they're worth?"
Ah.
What something is "worth" is what somebody is willing to pay. No more, no less.
Absent some meaningfull competition, you're paying what ebay demands, not what it's worth.
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