you gotta fight for your right to auuuuuuuuuction!

Last week Businessweek published a piece about the new winds blowing under eBay’s wings – a set-price-retailer wind.

The changing market and advanced technology have unfortunately given too many tools for a specific type of user to be able to ruin the auctioning user experience for the majority of other users. it is no fun to auction and follow your item for days just to get outbid in the last minute by someone that doesn’t really care about the item or that has entered the bid in the last 30 sec. that’s not fair play. and so many users say ‘what the heck, i’ll just go to the retailer site and pay more, but at least my time wont go to waste’. so instead of tackling the problem that compromises the auctioning experience - the exact same experience  which makes eBay such a unique space - eBay are opting for the easy way and saying ‘well, if you can’t (i.e. dont have the time/resource/whatever to) beat them, join them!’. Unfortunately this rubbish step will not only remove any sort of personality from the site but will literally turn it into one more amazon. and as we already have (a quite successful, so i have heard…) Amazon, we don’t really need another one.

this is an example of a site that is opting to go for the easy way, not listen and react to the user needs, and will have to face the results of users voting with their mouses and going to other new auction sites that will fight for the right to auction.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_26/b4090052447314.htm?chan=search