RSSeBay 'Express' to Offer Instant Buying
By Ed Oswald | Published January 19, 2006, 4:15 PM
In a letter to eBay members, eBay North America President Bill Cobb said the company plans to launch a specialty site where items would be available for immediate purchase. He says eBay hopes that the new site would attract customers who prefer a more conventional e-shopping experience.
It was not immediately clear how much eBay Express would differ from the company's current "Buy it Now" feature other than providing a central location for such listings. However, instead of purchasing items separately from each seller, the site would offer a shopping cart allowing for purchase from multiple sellers.
Listing that would qualify for the new site, such as Store and Fixed Price items, would be cross promoted on both eBay and eBay Express. To be included on the new site, a seller would need to have 98 percent positive feedback or better, as well as a feedback score of 100 or better. Also, the seller would be required to accept Paypal.
"We’re consciously making the buying experience on eBay Express different," Cobb wrote. "And to deliver that experience, we’ll be opening eBay Express to sellers who have a positive track record on the site and who list items that are available for immediate purchase."
Cobb said the new site was a "complicated undertaking," and that planning and development work is now being finalized. At launch, only U.S. sellers would be able to offer their products on the site. Plans do eventually include the addition of international sellers, he added.
As well as announcing the new site, Cobb also detailed changes to eBay's fee structure. Core insertion fees for items with starting bids of $0.01 to $0.99 would be lowered a nickel to 20 cents. Final value fees would also change for the middle level from 2.75 to 3 percent. Fees for eBay stores would remain the same.
There's a lot of negativity in here. Companies need to always be tweaking and improving their services. or get out of the way for companies that will. What if Google "let well enough alone" and figured Yahoo was doing a good enough job at search? What if Ebay "left well enough alone" and never bought Paypal, never introduced buy it now? "Leaving well enough alone" is a losing attitude. That's not how things progress and evolve. Ultimately, the consumer decides on what is better, on what makes it or doesn't and luckily we have companies with the courage to innovate and find out what we as consumers want.
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Personally, I HATE auctions and only use "buy it now". And I've been ripped off by inexperienced sellers!!! If eBay wnats to have an area that is only "buy it now" with sellers I can trust, I would buy from there instead.
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Why change a winning formula? God knows, but they always do, from Microsoft Office to the last series of 'Moonlighting'. Someone else will be taking over from eBay in the next few years, I think, unless Big Government doesn't like the idea of a truly open and free market with such a percentage share of the world's Money Movement, in which case eBay will just become another sterile shopping mall -albeit an online one- and anyone looking to replace it will be legislated out of the market under the 'fear of terrorism/money laundering' aegis. Sigh.
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I am intrigued to know how long it will be before the "eBay Express" system has the effect of completely pushing out the smaller eBay-Shop or Store owners. The eBay shops were meant as an extention for the sellers who created more and more business,(at least that is how I saw it). With the eBay Express system, will come long established retailers, who will (quite understandably) want as much of the 100 million eBay traffic, as they can get.
Sad idea for the (true) eBayers who helped to grow the businesses. Is this the beginning of the end?
PulpKult
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Very valid point, PulpKult. Quite a few eBay shop owners have seen the writing on the wall months ago and have already shut down their eBay stores and moved their business to their own webpages. Many other eBay store owners just continue to struggle along, working harder and making less profit.
Now that eBay also owns CraigsList, the area of viable competition has shrunk even more. Hopefully, Googlebase will get it together and really take off. Yahoo and Amazon stores, despite having had several years head start, plenty of financial backing and advertising support, are still too unpolished to be a true competitors to eBay... for the time being anyway.
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Um.. so what is buy it now? Is this like buy it Now NOW!!?
We don't need a place to sell retail items, regular users have items for sale on Ebay, why do we need a retail site? I thought that was the point of Ebay?
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I thought that half.com was essentially this same thing. It was doing great until Ebay bought them, and now it's not used much at all.
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I use it quite a bit and seem to have good luck finding what i want to buy and selling my own stuff. I have no idea what the traffic statistics show though, so I couldn't say if it's died off any. I actually don't mind it being part of eBay though, as it puts feedback and other shared information in one place.
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"We’re consciously making the buying experience on eBay Express MORE COMPLICATED AND REDUNDANT."
There, fixed it for him. I used to love eBay but they simply cannot leave well enough alone. It must be terrible to be raking in millions upon millions and still be so overcome with greed.
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