You mean like alienating legitimate sellers by cancelling their auctions when they report fakes in someone elses? Allowing power sellers of grossly misrepresented crap to thrive and rip people off? Not having the competence to police auctions effectively other than looking for Forbidden Text™?
Yahoo tried "100% free" auctions in an effort to challenge eBay. They failed miserably. Why? eBay already had 99.999998% of all the eyeballs. Game over.
No, eBay will have to blow this up themselves in order to give anyone else a chance. Possible, but unlikely....
Dave
Always looking for original, better date VF20-VF35 Barber quarters and halves, and a quality beer.
1. eBay is morphing out of the on-line auction business into real estate and general internet transactions. It recently bought 1/4 of Craigist, the world's premiere real estate, employment, and personal ads website, and to my recollection recently bought rent.com.
The profits and margins in real estate and on-line personal ads dwarf those of coins, and Craigslist will eventually adopt a fee-based model, so we collectors will become increasingly unimportant to eBay from a revenue point of view.
2. the annual sales dollar value of bullion silver and bullion gold, and numismatic coins runs in the billions. Assuming an auction site collected 1% of $500,000,000/year in sales, and was well received, its income stream should be sufficient to induce a specialty site operator to set it up, like perhaps a consortium of PCGS, ANACS. and dealers like Heritage, which already possesses an operating platform similar to identical to eBay's. Achieving that threshold amount should be possible is large dealers like Legend and HNAI, which advertises extemsively on ebay, support a replacement website.
3. eBay might not even fight to retain the business, because of the contingent risks involved in turning an indifferent eye to the world's largest and most profitable counterfeiting operation (compare the 1896-s quarters for sale on eBay with those imaged in the coin authentication pages of the Barber Coin collectors Society available on pcgs.com; "new" die varieties seem to come out all the time) which it appears to lack the technical expertise to control, unlike the ANA, PCGS, and HNAI, which are extremely familiar with both authentication issues and the business practices and reputations of buyers and sellers. and can track and trace new players through their existing networks.
4. from what I have observed and read, a "Debit and Deposit" alternative to Paypal, which only debits buyers bank accounts, as Paypal often does, and credits sellers' accounts, which Paypal does, could be profitably operated for a fraction of whct Paypal charges, and probably on a sliding scale as sales price increases, because the amortized system set-up cost, and marginal operating cost, of each additional transaction is the same regardless of the dollar amount of the transaction.
A lot of Ancient Dealers sell there - not too many US and World Dealers but I see that the dealer membership is increasing in those categories as well.
Why re-invent the wheel if a credible venue already exists?
Fixed Price and Auctions...
Kind Regards, John
John C. Knudsen, LM ANA 2342, LM CSNS 337 SFC, US Army (Ret.) 1974-1994
Comments
<< <i>eBay would have to make a big mistake >>
You mean like alienating legitimate sellers by cancelling their auctions when they report fakes in someone elses? Allowing power sellers of grossly misrepresented crap to thrive and rip people off? Not having the competence to police auctions effectively other than looking for Forbidden Text™?
Keeper of the VAM Catalog • Professional Coin Imaging • Prime Number Set • World Coins in Early America • British Trade Dollars • Variety Attribution
No, eBay will have to blow this up themselves in order to give anyone else a chance. Possible, but unlikely....
Dave
wonderful chinese knock offs , look just like the real thing
now more than ever.
Believe me, it will happen. The cost structure of an Indian company will be less than 1/10th of ebay to start it up.
I give ebay 2 more years before this happens.
1. eBay is morphing out of the on-line auction business into real estate and general internet transactions. It recently bought 1/4 of
Craigist, the world's premiere real estate, employment, and personal ads website, and to my recollection recently bought rent.com.
The profits and margins in real estate and on-line personal ads dwarf those of coins, and Craigslist will eventually adopt a fee-based
model, so we collectors will become increasingly unimportant to eBay from a revenue point of view.
2. the annual sales dollar value of bullion silver and bullion gold, and numismatic coins runs in the billions. Assuming an auction site
collected 1% of $500,000,000/year in sales, and was well received, its income stream should be sufficient to induce a specialty site
operator to set it up, like perhaps a consortium of PCGS, ANACS. and dealers like Heritage, which already possesses an operating
platform similar to identical to eBay's. Achieving that threshold amount should be possible is large dealers like Legend and HNAI,
which advertises extemsively on ebay, support a replacement website.
3. eBay might not even fight to retain the business, because of the contingent risks involved in turning an indifferent eye to the world's
largest and most profitable counterfeiting operation (compare the 1896-s quarters for sale on eBay with those imaged in the coin
authentication pages of the Barber Coin collectors Society available on pcgs.com; "new" die varieties seem to come out all the time)
which it appears to lack the technical expertise to control, unlike the ANA, PCGS, and HNAI, which are extremely familiar with both
authentication issues and the business practices and reputations of buyers and sellers. and can track and trace new players through
their existing networks.
4. from what I have observed and read, a "Debit and Deposit" alternative to Paypal, which only debits buyers bank accounts, as Paypal
often does, and credits sellers' accounts, which Paypal does, could be profitably operated for a fraction of whct Paypal charges, and
probably on a sliding scale as sales price increases, because the amortized system set-up cost, and marginal operating cost, of each
additional transaction is the same regardless of the dollar amount of the transaction.
Doesn't a viable venue already exist in VCoins?
http://www.vcoins.com/
A lot of Ancient Dealers sell there - not too many US and World Dealers but I see that
the dealer membership is increasing in those categories as well.
Why re-invent the wheel if a credible venue already exists?
Fixed Price and Auctions...
Kind Regards,
John
SFC, US Army (Ret.) 1974-1994