Written on May 5, 2008 – 2:13 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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“Keep fees at eBay“, with that catchphrase Wigix challenges eBay for an open fight. This new socially-driven marketplace wants to compete with the online trade giant by offering transparency and a Web 2.0 flavor. They managed to stir up the blogosphere last week with their bold statements, so let’s take a closer look on what this service offers. The transparency comes down to this:
Stop guessing your fees. Wigix doesn’t aim to gouge its members.
For items sold between $25 and $100, we ask for a buck and a half from both the seller and the buyer.
We ask for an additional 2% of the portion above $100 from the seller if the price goes over $100.
If the price goes over $1000, we ask for an additional 1% of that portion.
For items below $25, we charge nothing!
Stop letting other marketplaces chip away at your profits with multiple fees. Wigix asks for no listing fees, and has no hidden fees.
And for the Web 2.0 flavor, or maybe Web 3.0 - you name it, Wigix is giving users the opportunity to become a category expert. He or she has the responsibility to review, reject, approve submissions made to their category and update blogs and discussion boards several times a week. It pays one percent of the category’s revenue. After a while this can become an interesting source of income.
There’s a second way of contributing to the community for a financial reward: homesteading. Just like the US government gave away land to pioneers in the Wild Wild West, Wigix gives users money for adding items to the catalog. So imagine there are no Burberry umbrellas on Wigix yet. You can then add this item and earn 5 percent of all the fancy umbrellas that will be sold in the future. Nice, uh?
It’s obvious that Wigix wants to create a community of people who all feel their part of a revolution. That’s why they draw a line with the Wild west and speak of “like-minded collectors and traders”. Smart strategy, if you ask me. They might even approach active eBay users and lure them into the Wigix camp by addressing their conscious: “Wouldn’t you want to be part of this honest way of trading?”. Let’s see if Wigix can pull it of.
Written on April 29, 2008 – 9:47 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Boris with Rolf Skyberg in San Francisco
Rolf Skyberg is a ‘Disruptive Innovator’ at eBay.com. Last week I asked him about his opinion on what the future of eBay looks like, what he thought about the rumors that eBay might sell Skype and about his vision for the future of eBay in general.
Rolf pointed me to a blog post he wrote earlier this month titled “is your brand keeping you back?“. Although the post isn’t about eBay specifically it does give us an idea of what Rolf is thinking about at eBay. He told me he would hate to see Skype go and thinks that eBay could easily become more than the marketplace it is right now. If you see eBay simply and only as a marketplace then it is hard to see the added value of eBay. But if you see eBay as a service that provides rich interaction between people then things suddenly look very different.
eBay = exchange of goods
PayPal = exchange of money
Skype = exchange of conversations
PayPal is not JUST the money exchange engine that enables easy transactions for eBay but yet another product that enables interaction between people. eBay’s businesses aren’t just about the *exchange*, but specifically to enable and empower people to do things together. It enables the type of interaction that would be impossible to accomplish alone.
Skype would just be a third pillar for the eBay empire. If you look at eBay this way you could suddenly see them acquiring Twitter.com to enable the exchange of short messags and it making perfect sense.
Read the post at Rolf’s blog and exchange ‘McDonals’ with ‘eBay’ for an entertaining inside look into the future of eBay.
Written on March 28, 2008 – 2:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Craigslist, the website that brought classified ads from newspapers to the web in 1995, has joined the translation train. Like other American Internet giants, they saw the need to support more languages than just English (and Spanish).
Founder Craig Newmark originally created the service for the San Fransisco Bay Area. In 2000, he started conquering more and more cities in the U.S. As of September 2007, Mr. Newmark’s company has established itself in 450 cities in 50 countries. The site counts 27 million unique visitors monthly.
Yet as TechCrunch reported last month: competitor Kijiji - owned by Ebay - is picking up speed and even claims to surpass Craigslist one day. The eBay executive in charge of Kijiji explained to TechCrunch why they started Kijiji in the first place:
We did not believe Craigslist was going to be successful internationally with an English-only site. Craigslist has had zero localization. It is all English, run out of San Francisco.
This tough talk must have made an impression on Craigslist’s staff because normally they ‘tend to do stuff without much announcement‘, but now they ‘figured you might want to know that we implemented multiple language support for craigslist in November. Just Spanish then, but last week we added more languages’.
These languages are Italian, French, Portuguese and German (click for examples). It seems like more and more major companies think of multilingual support as the key for further growth. Although Craigslist might be pushing it too far: “Basque, maybe Klingon, are next”.
Written on January 16, 2008 – 4:20 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Kopy Kat Kidz, German Internet entrepreneurs Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer, have invested in Facebook, reports TechCrunch this morning. They’re famous for bringing international successfully concepts to German soil - hence the Kopy Kat nickname - yet now they seem to have changed their strategy. So here comes the European money, Silicon Valley!
It fits perfectly in the trend of US based social networks developing local editions of their pages. Facebook probably just wants their knowledge and local market insights, which the Samwer family definitely has. Some examples of their copies of international success stories:
- Back in 1999, the Samwer brothers created the German auction site Alando, basically a Ebay rip-off. Ebay solved it monopolist-style and bought the site months later for 43 million dollars.
- After that they started Jamba, a ringtone company. Millions of people still hate them for the irritating, yet successful, Crazy Frog ringtone. I don’t think the Samwers care though, since they sold Jamba to US based company for 273 million dollars in 2004.
- They’ve invested in German Twitter look-a-like Frazr.com
- German student networking site StudiVZ also got some help from the three Samwers. Before they sold it to a German publishing group for 100 million euro they reportedly tried to sell it to Facebook in return for a five percent stake.
So they failed in their last try, but now they’re back using their knowledge of the German market internationally. Is this the beginning of a trend: European investments in US based companies in order to create local sites?
[WebTipr: David Petherick, United Kingdom]
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