The Wholesale Forums

[Declang]

Would an ebay competitor ever work? With all the possible funding would someone ever take a sizeable market share from ebay? If they manage to attract sellers with lower fees they still need to attract buyers.

[Anthony]

Never say never. It would take something formidable to even scratch the service. Frankly, I think you would need to bring something extremely innovative to the table as re-inventing the wheel just wouldn't make the cut as eBay have such a dominant position.

The Amazon Marketplace is really one of the only venues that competes. In recent years its popularity has increased due to unfavourable changes at eBay.

[hardwareheroes]

ebid have tried and, so far, failed.

They are friendly, flexible and have lower fees for sellers yet they still can't make a dent in the market.

It would take something incredible and a corporation with hundreds of millions to invest to come up with a competitor to ebay

[dane12]

Reason enough to create a new startup team and attract some potential VCs.
We all know ebay is a big player, but that's not enough. Once there was Yahoo also at this time a good player, then came Google small, new and fresh. And now is Google the big boy. There was myspace, then came facebook, there was a microblogging site then came twitter and so on.
Sooner or later it will come a new web 2.0 project that will do very well and outperform this. Then there is one good reason, it will solve a problem for a lot of people like small business owners, bedroom seller, hobby sellers and so on.

[jamestyrer]

Ur missing the point, Google didnt just happen to be number 1 because of natural reasons. They bought their position, spent millions doing it, and continue to do so!

[ADC]

I would disagree with that actually. Google have got to the position they are in now by coming up with fresh innovative ideas.

In the good old days of dial up they realised that actually all people wanted was a simple quick loading search engine page with no adverts, not a page that took half a day to load.

Since then they have constantly come up with fresh ideas, such as the adwords and the adsense programs, Google Apps, Google Earth and now Google Street View. On top of that apparently it's a fantastic company to work for, so they get the best people. All this has just left competitors trailing in their wake.

I think there is always room for a company to be successsful and make it big time with a small budget as long as the do something new and innovative. Whether it's taking a fresh look at an old idea or doing something totally brand new.

The trouble with ebid is they have basically just tried to copy ebay without offering anything new. They have tried to attract sellers by offering free listings etc, but what they need to realise is you need to attract the buyers first. If you get the buyers the sellers will come anyway.

[Robert_Brewster]

ok ADC, but they have spent millions surely getting things like google earth, street view set up!

[ADC]

True but I don't think they have bought their number one position as James suggests. Lots of companies spend millions without getting anywhere near number one.

Also when the 2 guys started Google they didn't have millions. It's new fresh ideas that make the difference not the money.

[Acetech]

That's actually true, though yes it would have cost millions to get google earth and street view set up but they weren't there from the start, the main thing which attracted people to google at first was the page loading time and not being bombarded with ads, basically the sheer simplicity of it. then as the money started coming in they invested to make it bigger and better.

[Great-Games-UK]

If eBid want to compete with eBay they need a serious amount of money to ADVERTISE nothing else really, just advertise.