Overstock email "NOW IS THE MOMENT TO STRIKE. HELP US. "
ScarsdaleCoin
Posts: 5,223 ✭✭✭✭✭
just received this email from Overstock....interesting.....
NOW IS THE MOMENT TO STRIKE. HELP US.
Dear Overstock.com Auctions Users,
On Friday, February 18, eBay raised their fees. Our fees were already more than 30 0.000000e+00ss than eBay's, but against their new fees we drop to about 40-5010044675750ff. As a bonus, we dropped fees another 520n February 18, for one month, and are giving listing credits. Also on Friday, February 18, we went live with ChannelAdvisor. For 60 days, anyone listing on our site using ChannelAdvisor's tool will see free postings (the "big thing brewing" we referred to last week on the message board). As a result of these dynamics, our listings have soared from 50,000 to 106,000 in a week. The quality of listings is excellent.
When we launched Overstock.com Auctions, we thought it was going to take us a while to show eBay PowerSellers that their interests aligned with ours: "You will not get a fair shake from eBay until a legitimate competitor develops, and we want to be that competitor, so help us." As a result, our TV commercial promoting auctions, and our radio commercial, were designed to convince eBay sellers to give us a shot. In fact, of course, it took the community of eBay PowerSellers about 48 hours to figure out why they should try us out.
Thus, we have been rewriting our radio and TV ads to focus more on drawing eBay buyers to our site. We sought and received excellent advice from posters on our message board, advice we incorporated into our new buyer-oriented radio ad, and the new TV ad that is being arranged. Starting on Monday, February 21, 600f our advertising will be focused on auctions. All radio ads are the new, buyer-oriented ad our message board members helped us write. We switched all TV advertising to the auction ad as well (on cable stations: we are still fighting to get the networks to play it). For the next several weeks, advertising will be focused on auctions, to try to make this catch fire.
We (you and Overstock.com Auctions) have one chance to make this work. You gain, we gain. Given the confluence of eBay's fee hike, our fee drop, our integration with ChannelAdvisor, and our focusing advertising on auctions, now is that chance.
Each of you knows thousands of eBay buyers. Now is the time to contact them and tell them to try Overstock.com Auctions. Let them know that:
Our listings are respectable in quantity (about 100,000) and quality.
Our technology is working smoothly.
Our auctions customer service department is staffed, trained, and broken in.
In sum, if there were ever a time to strike, now is that time.
We are doing our part. We built and tuned the site, staffed customer service, cut fees, made a deal with ChannelAdvisor to get good listings, and devoted a six figure budget to auctions advertising.
Please do your part by telling thousands of eBay buyers to try us now. You'd be doing us a favor, we know, but you are doing yourselves a favor too.
Your humble servants,
Patrick Byrne - Chairman & President
Holly MacDonald-Korth - VP of Auctions
Sam Peterson - CTO of Auctions
NOW IS THE MOMENT TO STRIKE. HELP US.
Dear Overstock.com Auctions Users,
On Friday, February 18, eBay raised their fees. Our fees were already more than 30 0.000000e+00ss than eBay's, but against their new fees we drop to about 40-5010044675750ff. As a bonus, we dropped fees another 520n February 18, for one month, and are giving listing credits. Also on Friday, February 18, we went live with ChannelAdvisor. For 60 days, anyone listing on our site using ChannelAdvisor's tool will see free postings (the "big thing brewing" we referred to last week on the message board). As a result of these dynamics, our listings have soared from 50,000 to 106,000 in a week. The quality of listings is excellent.
When we launched Overstock.com Auctions, we thought it was going to take us a while to show eBay PowerSellers that their interests aligned with ours: "You will not get a fair shake from eBay until a legitimate competitor develops, and we want to be that competitor, so help us." As a result, our TV commercial promoting auctions, and our radio commercial, were designed to convince eBay sellers to give us a shot. In fact, of course, it took the community of eBay PowerSellers about 48 hours to figure out why they should try us out.
Thus, we have been rewriting our radio and TV ads to focus more on drawing eBay buyers to our site. We sought and received excellent advice from posters on our message board, advice we incorporated into our new buyer-oriented radio ad, and the new TV ad that is being arranged. Starting on Monday, February 21, 600f our advertising will be focused on auctions. All radio ads are the new, buyer-oriented ad our message board members helped us write. We switched all TV advertising to the auction ad as well (on cable stations: we are still fighting to get the networks to play it). For the next several weeks, advertising will be focused on auctions, to try to make this catch fire.
We (you and Overstock.com Auctions) have one chance to make this work. You gain, we gain. Given the confluence of eBay's fee hike, our fee drop, our integration with ChannelAdvisor, and our focusing advertising on auctions, now is that chance.
Each of you knows thousands of eBay buyers. Now is the time to contact them and tell them to try Overstock.com Auctions. Let them know that:
Our listings are respectable in quantity (about 100,000) and quality.
Our technology is working smoothly.
Our auctions customer service department is staffed, trained, and broken in.
In sum, if there were ever a time to strike, now is that time.
We are doing our part. We built and tuned the site, staffed customer service, cut fees, made a deal with ChannelAdvisor to get good listings, and devoted a six figure budget to auctions advertising.
Please do your part by telling thousands of eBay buyers to try us now. You'd be doing us a favor, we know, but you are doing yourselves a favor too.
Your humble servants,
Patrick Byrne - Chairman & President
Holly MacDonald-Korth - VP of Auctions
Sam Peterson - CTO of Auctions
Jon Lerner - Scarsdale Coin - www.CoinHelp.com
0
Comments
A search for "PCGS" on Overstock returned 27 results. A search for "PCGS" on eBay returned 9,000 results.
This is one of Overstock's featured coin auctions today:
--Severian the Lame
<< <i>I hope they are successful. I've had enough of eBay. >>
I ditto that one. I'm finding better coins with the likes of Heritage & Teletrade when it comes to the internet, so I'm following those auctions more than e-bay.
I, too, wish them well. EBay needs to get a severe case of humility.
So, with that in mind, I mosied on over to check them out. I wasn't particularly impressed. Still, I thought I'd give them a try. I decided to register to bid in their auctions.
It seems that in order to even register and bid, you have to give them a credit card along with far more info than eBay ever asked me for. At that point I backed out to think about it. If I were going to sell, then I could understand their desire for all the information. Just to bid, I thought it was too invasive. So, they now have one less bidder than they would have had and I suspect they will have many, many less than they would have without such a process just to bid.
Somebody over there needs to rethink this if they have any hope of offering up a challenge to eBay.
John Marnard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, page 235ff
<< <i>I hope they are successful. I've had enough of eBay. >>
I wish them success as well, but I suspect that if they ever did get as successful as eBay, people would be griping about them as well. People always throw stones at the biggest players, for whatever reason. We want to take the big guy down.
Take FireFox, for example, the much touted alternative browser to IE. Did anyone catch the news yesterday that they released an update that patched 40 holes, including some big security breaches. If this were Microsoft patching IE, the nerd boards would be overflowing with anti-M$ rants.
Again, good luck to Overstock. But I don't imagine that a successful Overstock would be any more or less evil than eBay is now.
<< <i>Take FireFox, for example, the much touted alternative browser to IE. Did anyone catch the news yesterday that they released an update that patched 40 holes, including some big security breaches. >>
And, that will only get worse as more Microsoft haters switch to it without thinking about it. As the user base grows, so does the incentive for the slimeballs.
Russ, NCNE