Our eBay store
My seller's profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)
Transcript of the live chat session that took place Thursday, May 27, 1999. These sessions are normally scheduled for 12 noon-1 PM Eastern Time every Thursday. Please note that the US is now on Daylight Savings Time. So in international terms, we are on at GMT -4.
For Guide to eBay for sellers: practical advice from one seller to another, see www.samizdat.com/ebay.html
Since the chat itself happens at a rapid pace, it's often difficult to note interesting facts in particular URLs as they appear on-line. Here's a place to take a more leisurely look. I've rearranged some of the pieces to try to capture the various threads of discussion (which sometimes get lost in the rush of live chat).
Please send email with your follow-on questions and comments, and suggestions for topics we should focus on in future sessions. So long as the volume of email responses is manageable, I'll post the most pertinent ones here for all to see.
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For transcripts of previous sessions and a list of future topics, www.samizdat.com/chat.html.
For an article on how to make "business chat" work (based on this experience), www.samizdat.com/events.html.
For articles about online auctions, go to www.samizdat.com/auc.html
Our online store at Yahoo
Our eBay
store
My seller's
profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)
Richard Seltzer -- Welcome, keen and Bob. Please introduce yourselves and let us know your interests. That will help us get off to a fast start.
Bob@CottageMicro.Com -- Howdy y'all. Bob Zwick, independent consultant in the Dallas Texas area.
ed -- Hi all This is Ed in Pittsburgh.
Bob@CottageMicro.Com -- Richard is having difficulty with the server, so I suppose we can just go on til he gets here.
Ron Rothenberg -- Ron Rothenberg-Belmont, MA - I auction off computer hardware, software, digital cameras and scanners on Ebay and Amazon.
Richard Seltzer (12:25) -- Sorry folks. I lost my connection to the Web-net server at the stroke of 12. Tracy Marks also has been unable to get in. I don't know what the trouble was.
tracy5 -- I'm here now....though it took me nearly half an hour to get in. Am also interested in idea of auctioning services (Tracy Marks, Boston area Internet trainer)
Richard Seltzer -- Bob Zwick -- yes, I believe that auctions are here to stay. It's a unique and very valuable way of selling goods. For new commodity consumer goods, the buyer gets a good price and the merchandise moves quickly. For collectibles and used stuff, it's a way to turn junk into cash. If anything, I'd expect to see the auction style spread to new categories of merchandise and even services.
Bob Fleischer -- Many people think that business-to-business style auctions will really become big once the business-to-business equivalents to Ebay are in place.
Ron Rothenberg -- there is an excellent article on the ebay and amazon business models this week in Business Week.
Bob@CottageMicro.Com -- I think bus-2-bus would be great for stock clearances and over stocked items. I don't think auctions will replace wholesale.
Ron Rothenberg -- there are many bus-2-bus auctions right now. Ebay has said that they are not after that sort of business.
Ron Rothenberg -- static pricing is really artificial - dynamic pricing is more natural when info is available.
Richard Seltzer -- Ron -- yes, dynamic pricing is one of the main reasons that on-line auctions are here to stay. They put large numbers of buyers and sellers in touch with one another, and let supply-demand determine price. Perfect capitalism :-)
Richard Seltzer -- In most areas of Internet commerce, sex/porn business has led the way. Are there any well-known instances of that kind of service being sold auction-style on the Internet? E.g., there are many sites for escort services. Their people are a limited commodity -- just so many of them and just so many available hours. Do any of them operate auction-style? If not, that would totally convince me that it would not make sense to auction services of any kind.
Bob@CottageMicro.Com -- Interesting concept Richard. I think some in-demand IT people could really benefit from contraating their service to the highest bidder !
Richard Seltzer -- Bob -- Yes, it seems to be logical. If you have more customers than you can handle in the time you have available, it would seem to make sense to begin to auction your time (if there were a site set up with the infrastructure to make that easy). You could sell specific hours, or you could sell retainers for a certain number of hours per month. But is anyone doing that? And is there any site that handles such business (with all the paraphenalia to help in the matchmaking and to help build trust.
Bob Fleischer -- I could imagine people whose business is seasonal auctioning their services -- a tax accountant, for example.
Ron Rothenberg -- Selling intangibles such as services (especially those with huge qualitative differences) is not something you could do easilyl on the web. If I were to start a business, it would be to help buyers and sellers of services find each other -- offering feedback, info, etc., in a pressure-free environment. Would you shop for a surgeon or a dentist at an auction? How about a gardener? A financial planner?
Richard Seltzer -- Re: services. Ron, I agree that an auction site is not a good way to "sell" services. What I'm getting at is that there are a number of people and businesses who basically are booked near their limit. They could and should auction their available time among the customers who know them and want to do business with them. If there were a site available with the right infrastructure, they could point their customers there to establish price and time in competition with one another. Just an idea.
Bob@CottageMicro.Com -- Ron - lol - "I found my doctor at eBay" As far as services, I would consider brokering individuals to agencies in the high-tech arena. Lots of legwork(cyber) and infrastucture required.
tracy5 -- One of the problems I see in regard to auctioning services has to do with how the buyer is "bound" to follow through on the auction. It may be hard to know in advance if the seller has precisely the skills etc. that one is seeking. There needs to be an easier way out of the auction when we're talking about services (also perhaps for car auctions too.....if one sees/test drives a car and decides one doesn't want it etc. anyone knows what's going on in this regard?)
Ron Rothenberg -- "I saved $3000 on my open-heart surgery on ebay."
Richard Seltzer -- Services probably involves several layers. The topmost layer would be consultant X has more clients than he can handle and rather than raise his rates across the board and risk losing business or stay with his current rate and lose potential money, and rather than wind up doing work for one client whose job isn't urgent while neglecting another client with an emergecy because no time was availabe -- such a person sets up an auction-style situation that only involves previous clients, who know very well what he can do.
Bob Fleischer -- Richard, re "there are a number of people and businesses who basically are booked near their limit. They could and should auction their available time" -- this suggest that not all auctions need look exactly like generic auctions. Such an application might look more like a scheduling/calendar application, with the added wrinkle that conflicts are settled by a priority determined by a "price willing to pay".
Richard Seltzer -- Bob Fleischer -- Exactly. That's what I'm getting at. There are all different flavors of auctions. Selling services Ebay style doesn't work (I agree Ron). But it should be possible to set up an infrastructure into which consulting companies could direct their potential clients when time is short and demand is high. They should be able to see the time blocks that are available, the amounts currently bid for them etc. And the auctions for time should end, probably, at least a week before the assignment so all parties have time to make the necessary preparations. That feels like an untapped business area.
Ron Rothenberg -- services with certifications are more sellable than those with out -- surgery by a board-certified plastic surgeon, or network setup by an MCSE would be easier to sell than those same services from unknown providers.
Ron Rothenberg -- Bob, I would say the smart ones do auction their time by quoting higher prices when they are busy. Don't you?
Ron Rothenberg -- i think the economic term is "perfection." Perfect items are interchangable -- one quart of milk is interchangable in most people's mind with another. but services are far less perfect. A good carpenter's time is not equivalent to that of a bad carpenter.
Ron Rothenberg -- i remember a book, "selling the invisible" which is all about selling intangibles. Much harder in most cases than selling PRODUCTS people can touch.
Richard Seltzer -- Ron -- regarding the interchangeability of services/consulting. I agree that for parties who don't know one another, don't have experience doing business with one another a trusted third party -- agency -- is helpful in making matches. Such a third party -- if really good and really trusted -- might then be able to set up auctions for clients (e.g., Novell-certified or Microsoft-certified engineer available for such-and-such kinds of assignments). Or Kelly-Girl style office services help. (That's different from and in addition to the kind of service auction I was talking about earlier.)
tracy5 -- I would imagine that the services that would do best are ones that anyone could do with a specific set of skills.... (like tuning up a car).....not ones that require specific troubleshooting/problemsolving of unique situations.......
Bob@CottageMicro.Com -- Ron - that's really supply and demand pricing. If I could auction blocks of time to the highest bidder in a global market I could problaly retire quickly.
Richard Seltzer -- Ron -- I agree about "selling the invisible", but auctioning is not always the same as selling. If I have three clients who need me at the same time and who know the quality of my work, I could use an auction style to set the price and determine which of those clients I would work for during that time. That has nothing to do with "selling."
Richard Seltzer -- Tracy -- the troubleshooting/problemsolving also might be auctionable in that special case I've been describing, where the bidders are already well familiar with the person selling the services.
Ron Rothenberg -- "one root canal by experienced endodontist - bidding starts at $150." will the highest bid come from someone whose teeth hurt, or someone who fears he may need a root canal in the distant future?
Richard Seltzer -- Ron -- Probably the high bid would come from someone whose insurance company honors bills from that particular dentist. Actually, your example is not far-fetched. A dental services auction could and probably will be run by a dental insurance company to keep down its costs. The dentists would be the ones bidding for the patient's business.
Ron Rothenberg -- Dentists bid for providing services to hmos, etc., now.
Richard Seltzer -- Ron -- Interesting, I didn't know that. Is that bidding on a general basis -- their regular fees? Or do you mean bidding on particular jobs? (e.g., multi-thousand-dollar orthodonture)
Ron Rothenberg -- actually scalping is already a big biz on ebay. It opens scalping up to the masses! Now you can not only be a scalpee, but also a scalper.
Bob Fleischer -- They'd probably involve a new middleman company to handle the auction!
Ron Rothenberg -- I would go with the tickets.
Richard Seltzer -- Bob Fleischer -- yes, there's probably room for an auction site that focuses on selling tickets to entertainment events -- not as scalpers, but as the sole ticket agent. or a site that for a fixed fee makes it easy for a group or a promoter do that themselves.
tracy5 -- Richard, there is an online ticket auction site already. I'll see if I can find the url.
tracy5 -- Here's one of the online ticket auctions.....tickets.com at http://auction.tickets.com/
Richard Seltzer -- Tracy -- thanks for that pointer. It seemed like too good of an idea for someone not to have done it already.
Ron Rothenberg -- there is a big market for concert tickets on ebay.
Richard Seltzer -- Ron -- that market for concert tickets on ebay -- is that strictly secondary sales ("scalping", hence somewhat questionable in some states -- though I don't understand why)? Or are groups doing initial offers of tickets through Ebay? (I'd be a bit surprised at that -- but there are few days that go by without me being surprised :-)
Ron Rothenberg -- there are great software deals, just no "burn-em yourself CDs" and OEMs. they were very hard to compete with.
ed -- Does anyone have an example of how Ebay has worked for them? Possibly made money?
Richard Seltzer -- Ed -- For the last three months, I've been selling old comic books and bottlecaps (from the basement) at Ebay, mainly as an experiment, on weekends primarily. My revenue has ranged from $200 to $900 per week.
ed -- Bottle caps? Super
tracy5 -- Ed - My example. I sold an old autographed copy of an Ayn Rand book for $889 several weeks ago (transaction using Ebay's I-Escrow service). And am selling about 120 sets of my ice skating photos per month now, with customers also now contacting me directly asking for special orders. Though it's been too time-consuming to be that lucrative as of yet. Takes too much time to sort through the negatives and run back and forth to the photo lab, though there are some real possibilities here in the long run. In any case, two months ago I was an amateur photographer and due to Ebay I've become a professional figure skating photographer in less than two months. (Too bad the season is ending now....)
Richard Seltzer -- Ron -- "frequent flyer gift certificates"? Sounds interesting. Please explain. Don't frequent flyer miles have a fixed value -- something like $100 for 10,000 miles?
Ron Rothenberg -- Yes, ff miles have a fixed-value, but people tend to overestimate the value. Look at how it sways their market behavior.
Ron Rothenberg -- actually $200 for 10,000 miles. You are one of the few underestimators.
tracy5 -- Yes, I've posted auction notices in a newsgroup, and even joined several mailing lists just to post auction notices (where it was definitely ok to do so, as the lists were dedicated to the subject). And am about to put more info on my web site.....That's another important topic.....not just attracting people already at Ebay but drawing people who are new to auctions.. Since auctions are really hot now, people are responding. (It's easy to tell when most of your new bidders have a 0 by their name)
ed -- Great.
Richard Seltzer -- All -- if you have followup questions and comments please send them to me for inclusion with the transcript. seltzer@samizdat.com
Richard Seltzer -- All -- Before you sign off, please post your email and URL (don't presume that the software captured it). Thanks very much for joining us today. Please let me know your preferences for future topics. Please join us again next Thursday. And please spread the word.
tracy5 -- Tracy Marks, tracy@marks.net,
About Me at Ebay:
http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/torreyphilemon/
For next week, I'd like to hear more about recommendations in regard to
using other online auctions besides Ebay..... which ones are best for what
purposes......
Bob Fleischer -- Bob Fleischer, rjf@tiac.net, robert.fleischer@compaq.com, http://www.tiac.net/users/rjf/
Bob@CottageMicro.Com -- All - as usual it's been great. As soon as I get over my initial fear of the shear size of eBay and sell something, I'll let you know.
Ron Rothenberg -- Ron Rothenberg - Homebase@world.std.com http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/ronrsr
Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer
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