Genuine effort but just a cheap knockoff of Ebay
Written: May 31 '00
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| Full Review |
I've gone over the subject of Ebay's dominance in the auction field and various competitors efforts in prior reviews (check my profile page to find reviews on Ebay, Yahoo auctions, and Excite auctions). BidBay has made an effort to make extensive internal promotion of the site, but it just doesn't seem to work.
Pros (as in promotions):
BidBay is currently making two major efforts to increase use. They have eliminated general auction fees until July 31, 2000. Enhancements to auctions, such as special listings, still seem to incur a fee. In addition, they are giving 3 $100 prizes to users per day, along with a $50,000 limo and a $5,000 cruise at the end of August.
Cons (as in everything else):
But how good is the current BidBay auction enviroment? Alas, I have to report that it is quite deficient. They have the seemingly impressive total of 18,396 items as I write this early on June 1, but Ebay has stated they have over 4,000,000 items posted, 200 times the BidBay quantity. I tried a search for "babylon", as in Babylon 5. Ebay returned 2,000 items (many not related to Babylon 5), while Bidbay returned 2 (only 1 related to Babylon 5).
I couldn't even make a comparison using my intended search criteria, Babylon 5, because the BidBay search tool doesn't seem to understand or allow the very critical concept of AND, or they don't explain it in their search help. Ebay uses this as default, and allows users to whittle down hordes of unrelated listings to a finely focused list of high relevance. For example, it chops 2,000 Babylon listings down to 900 Babylon 5 CCG listings if you are looking for Babylon 5 gaming cards. The best one can do on BidBay is pick the most significant term, Babylon. If they get any volume in listings, they are going to need to enhance this tool greatly.
This site seems to present the appearance of a cheap Ebay, but in lesser quality. Their home pages and item pages have lots of similar designs. Even the name itself, BidBay, sound too much like Ebay.
Finally, with low-demand free auctions, sellers and buyers will not have the price dynamics available on Ebay. On Ebay, one has incentive to price items to sell (since they charge for listings), and the market forces will often drive prices up to fair levels. This allows room for both bargains and potential price appreciation for sellers. Here, there will probably be a gap between seller prices (not being able to count on a bid-up) and buyers (being dissapointed in no bargains). The best I would expect is BidBay to become a market in fringe-quality items that might not sell on Ebay.
Summary:
Without a compelling reason for sellers to put effort in (such as perhaps a payment from BidBay equal to a percentage of their sales), I don't see the promotions being able to attract enough activity to sustain the site.
The search engine is totally inadequate, there is no significant volume,
and this site looks like an Ebay knockoff. I give 1 star.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
wgrace
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Member: Bill
Location: New Jersey
Reviews written: 68
Trusted by: 22 members
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