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In the Neanderthal period of the Internet, when everything ‘internet related’ was worth 50 times it’s commercial value, no one understood it’s real value, compared to bricks and mortar businesses. Anyone who had computer programming experience was writing software programs for the internet.
Online auctions were the buzz because rather than someone just searching for a product to buy, contacting the seller and then negotiating over the phone (like we all used to do with the Trading Post … “tell’em they’re joking about that price”), online auctions made you come back to the website time and time again to see if you’d won the auction.
Ebay used some fantastic, “operate your own business” campaigns to make ordinary people realise that they could operate a business from home just by selling unwanted items and as a result bulk sellers make about 80% of all sales in online auctions. This is where we meet the next fork in the road for online auctions. Ebay with it’s market clout is trying to force all their sellers to use only Paypal as the method of payment, PayPal is an online payment system owned by Ebay.
In view of this turmoil, other online auction websites are promoting themselves like ravens to get some of the spoils of this turmoil and one of the biggest launches is that of Telstra owned business, Sensis, which owns the Trading Post (an other big Australian online portals like the Yellow and White pages).
If you want to check out some other online auctions here is a list:
http://www.tradingpost.com.au/
http://webshop.cashconverters.com.au/items
and a new service that is currently going to be launched: http://offerme.com.au/
One more thing that you might like to know is that almost anyone can now start an online auction website because the software that allows you to create is available for free! Yes, the Open Source movement has created many software programs that take all the hard work out of setting up and auction site of your own…. all you have to do is add products.
Happy buying and selling
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