posted on January 3, 2001 12:10:48 AM
Looks like today is a day that will live in infamy for auctions, what with Yahoo charging, eBay foisting some purely self-serving rules on side sales and Half.com using a postal rate increase as guise to pad its profits on S&H charges.
On the Yahoo-charging fees issue, it seems like there's a real consensus that they don't have the traffic and sell-through to justify charging for listings. It's like charging for a billboard in the middle of nowhere.
I think a smarter thing for them to do would be to develop and promote their own "universal search" tool along the lines of AW's (only "better, stronger, faster," etc.) Yahoo DOES have a lot of name recognition and a lot of traffic on their site for purposes other than auctions. They also have the programming talent to make it work. They could support it with banner ads on all parts of Yahoo and get a lot of people to at least give it a try. That's an advantage the little guys like AW don't have.
If they could get people trained to search across multiple auction sites, then they'll get a lot more pageviews (and, ultimately, bids) on their own site. Sure, many people would find and buy stuff on eBay through such a search tool. But it seems like Yahoo has much more to gain than to lose by doing something like this, given its market share and the fact that the ONLY way they can keep their auction business from dying on the vine is by getting more traffic across their site.
EBay could be expected to fight it tooth and nail, since so much of their plans for increased profitability depend on maintaining a dominant market share. But the best news for sellers would be if more new competing auction sites were able to get into the game. And I think the key to enabling that is to get people to use universal searches rather than auction-specific ones. I have been using AW's universal search for about 6 months now and it has led to a lot more buying on Yahoo.
