gBay?
An IM from a friend spurred me into thinking about gBay. The question he posed was
What would it take for google to unseat eBay?Simple as that. I guess eBay is no longer considered as invincible. Not that eBay as a company has done anything wrong. There weren’t any missteps, poor execution. The marketplace that eBay has created is still just as useful and dominating as it was before. The astounding growth rates of the past few days don’t seem realistic anymore, but eBay is still is expecting to grow at 30% y/o/y sales growth rate.
I guess we know live in a G-centric world where people are in awe of google’s success and wondering where else google can impact their life. They are wondering what other fields can google innovate in or leverage their market position into. This despite the fact that google has only demonstrated 2 market successes. According to me, they were only successful in doing search and maps. All the other endeavors of google are in a way - flop. I can go into my thoughts on this topic in another post. This one is to talk about gBay.
A good online Marketplace is about connecting sellers with buyers (vice versa) and facilitating transactions. Google has a lot of traffic and clearly connects buyers with sellers. But, i believe, google has a bit more ways to go before they can unseat eBay.What would it take for google to unseat eBay?
- If I am a seller, the bar to “use” google to sell my item is way higher than that for ebay. What do i mean by that? Well to be listed in ebay, you need an item, and a credit card. Just go to ebay, with a bit of pain, you can get your item listed and people looking at it. On google, you need to have your own website, and optimize it the right way for it to be picked up by google. Google needs to figure out a product for this kind of low volume, possibly non-repeat seller.
- If you are a mid-level seller, let’s say you have few items in a category that you acquire and sell. May be you restore buy used cell phones, restore them and sell on ebay. You have to have a web presence and software to manage your inventory etc. You then pay google purely for some keywords. Apart from paying for those, you have to either learn about keywork marketing and figure out the right ROI or employ an outside vendor. eBay is still very simple at this time. They have bulk tools.
- The top results that appear organically for google are permanent web pages with reputation (PageRank). So if you are searching for a “used honda civic in sunnyvale”, google won’t show you all the used hondas, instead they show you where you can likely find used hondas. As a seller, you’d rather be paying to be on those pages. Because any page you list doesnot have the reputation to be ranked in the top 5 pages anyway.
- Freshness. You list your item on ebay, you can find it in search results soon. google crawls the web once every few months.
- As a buyer, there’s limited information available to me about the seller. None of the reputation/feedback tools that ebay has.
- There are bad people in the world and fraud is a real problem for any marketplace. ebay has been dealing with fraud for years and the marketplace is slowly putting up some sort of restrictions in place. Granted these need to evolve, but gbay needs to think about fraud before jumping in.
- Facilitating pricing. eBay’s great asset is the auction format. Price negotiation happens and market flow sets pricing. How would gbay assist in price negotiation?
