I would love it if someone tackled the auctions market better. Ebay continues to focus more on being a marketplace, and promoting buy it nows. A real auction house should extend the time limit as long as people are putting in bids.
I'm amazed auctions have not taken over live show tickets. Scalpers skim off millions of dollars every year that events/middleman startup could capture themselves if only someone designed a proper live show ticket auction.
The artists don't want this. They want fans long-term, and for the fans to not feel excluded because of monetary reasons. They believe that keeping the tickets at a below-market rate achieves this. Whether this strategy has the effect they desire I have no idea.
But will they deal with the extra hassle of an auction to see their favorite artists when their artists are incentivized by millions of dollars in extra profit by using an auction based system?
I wouldn't mind seeing an auction site with a far more limited scope, and a limited number of auctions.
Say, like, a site for old video games. Anyone who wants to sell Street Fighter II for the SNES submits it to the Street Fighter II auction, and anyone who wants to buy it bids on it there. There aren't 500 Street Fighter II auctions, there's just one, creating a more efficient commodity market for Street Fighter II.
Maybe the answer here is a service where people can build their own auction sites around product categories they care about. The service, the auctioneer/curator, and the seller split up the proceeds of each sale.
The trick here is to make auctions seem _fair_. Every economist loves the idea of an auction because it is inherently more fair to sell a good at the price convergence of what someone is willing to pay with the scarcity of the object. The problem is that it often leaves all of the buyers unhappy. Either you got outbid and are annoyed that you need to keep looking for that good, or you won the auction and potentially feel buyers remorse that you overpaid for that good.
I think the problem here is that Ebay doesn't give any metrics on how frequent an item comes to market, nor does it give any pricing history for how much an object typically sells for. Instead of tackling those problems, they just opted for the "buy it now" button.
You can filter to Sold Listings to see what the average price is. The problem is that in many auctions for similar items are actually not so similar.
I search for camera gear a lot. When it comes to camera bodies, there's a lot of variation. With lens or without, with battery grip or without, what's the shutter count? What's the cosmetic condition? etc. etc.
But generally I just end up with a range by manually looking for the highs and lows, and then try to nab one at a price I think would be a "good deal"
>I think the problem here is that Ebay doesn't give any metrics on how frequent an item comes to market, nor does it give any pricing history for how much an object typically sells for.
I'm pretty sure you used to be able to search on completed auctions. I seem to remember doing that. But you seem to be correct that there's no way to do it now that I can see.
The big problem here are bots that bid on stuff at the last minute. That's why I filter out auctions most of the time and just find "Buy It Now" items.
I use Yahoo Auctions a lot because it’s the only place to get certain goods and sellers have the option to turn on a feature where every time someone bids with less than 5 minutes left, the timer extends to 5 minutes.
The pros and cons of ending at a specific time were discussed ad nauseam back in the day. There isn't a clearcut "right" approach.
To the broader point, I do wonder to what degree participating in eBay auctions was something of a fad. eBay was a bit of a hobby of mine for a while. In part, my buying habits have changed but I'm not sure you can separate out the "thrill of the hunt" from the more utilitarian aspects of using eBay to buy and sell.
eBay has become actively hostile for individuals selling. All their policies now heavily favour the buyer, and the scope for getting scammed is too high to make it worth the bother. Little wonder it's becoming more a marketplace.
Oh and not forgetting their 10% + Paypal fees, which makes them damn expensive.
Think there is a lot of scope for someone to do it better.
