posted on April 29, 2006 01:16:07 PM
It's the first step in moving fixed price listings out of the auction listings. If the Supreme Court decision on BIN goes against them, as it likely will, it will make the impact less painful. A year from now, you will see auctions on one side of the fence, and Express/Fixed Price/Stores/Half.Com on the other. It'll be interesting to see how they can all be cross promoted. If they work it right, the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. will become a seller's most powerful source of customers.
If Murphy's law is correct, everything East of the San Andreas Fault will slide into the Atlantic
posted on April 29, 2006 11:04:05 PM
I don't see express being any different than what you have on ebay right now with the auctions / buy it now tabs that ebay has now on the auction pages.
One of the first problems I noticed was that unlike amazon that uses the sku # to keep alike items on one page ebay does not have anything like this, so when I searched for a particular item, I had 5 pages of the same item by different sellers at different prices all using a little different title. For this to work for ebay they will have to come up with some way to keep alike items on one page so that when you do a search of an item you do not have 50 of the same items come up.
posted on April 30, 2006 11:00:12 AM
I just wonder if newbie buyers will buy 50 things from 50 different sellers, and then expect combined shipping for every single item.
posted on April 30, 2006 04:24:32 PM
That's the main reason why I can not see Express succeeding. If buyer buys from 10 different sellers and then sees the final shipping total, they will freak out.
Can't you just see all the bottom feeders buying those .99 cents items only to see a $120 freight bill on checkout?
Maybe Ebay will run a free shipping special on all orders over $100 to compete with other online merchants.
posted on April 30, 2006 08:56:04 PM
I think Express is a knee-jerk reaction to Google Base and changing buying preferences. Intelligent filters, making them easy to use, giving options for defaults in preferences and making them more visible, promoting the heck out of them, would have been much cleaner and would benefit auction sellers, store sellers, buyers, eBay and PayPal. Most Buyers have figured out how to search titles and descriptions. Why not include search stores right next to it? Why not include search items available for shopping cart there? On the left border or in advanced search could be condition, pricing options. Why go to the trouble of a whole new venue?
