Could an online auction site help newspapers in the revenue department? Tell us what you think.

"Because of the explosive growth in Internet usage in the past decade, a new revenue opportunity has opened up for newspapers and other local media. Boocoo.com was designed in part to regain revenue lost to online classified advertising and auction sites while giving consumers a secure and competitive alternative rich in local content,” said George Willard Sr., the Chairman, CEO, and Founder of Ranger Data Technologies.

"The massive audience produced by web users, loyal readers, and viewers of hundreds of trusted local media brands combined with Boocoo’s consumer centric site, will result in long term revenue growth for all our partners," said Mr. Willard.

Chicago’s Sun-Times Media is one of the newspaper companies to partner on Boocoo. "Sun-Times Media’s partnership with Ranger Data Technologies will help us to expand the ways we serve residents of the Chicago region," said Hunt Kingsbury, VP and General Manager of Interactive Media for Sun-Times Media. "Boocoo is a great resource for people who want an auction site that is competitive in price and very local. We are excited to offer this to the areas we already serve."

"Boocoo.com is an innovative and exciting approach for the local media to enter the e-commerce transactional marketplace,” said Kip Knight, a former Vice-President of Marketing for eBay North America who serves as a consultant to Ranger Data Technologies. "I also believe sellers should be attracted to the site because it is value priced relative to other online auctions."

I’ve seen a whole lot of people looking for alternatives to eBay, and it will be interesting to see if Boocoo becomes a legitimate contender in the space.

As a special promotion, fees are actually being waived for all consumers for a minimum of two weeks at Boocoo.

What do you think of Boocoo? Comment here.

 

eBay first announced the "5 Free Insertion Fees Every 30 Days" idea about a month ago.  On the front end, it was exactly as advertised, which was nice enough.  Sellers have never enjoyed forking over cash when their products don’t change hands.

The trouble came when sellers noticed that a final value fee of 8.75 percent (or $20 – whichever’s less) could actually cause them to owe eBay more money than usual under certain circumstances.

Now, as the program rolls out, it appears that nothing’s been changed.  Sellers just need to do the math carefully and consider opting out of the new fee structure by using an eBay or third party listing tool.

 

Still, eBay executives have their fingers crossed that the change will result in increased participation.  Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay Marketplaces, said in a statement, "By eliminating the upfront costs of selling on eBay, we hope this new structure will encourage all sellers – new, occasional or experienced – to use the offering as a cost-effective way to sell on our site and earn a little extra cash."

A couple months ago I talked to a number of eBay sellers, and all but one of them told me that eBay’s feedback policy was their biggest frustration. It now seems that eBay has decided to hear the howls of disgust from its users that have been going on for the majority of the past year. Ecommerce Journal reports:

The move to change the Feedback policy was prompted by numerous requests made by the cross-border sellers who received negative comments from customers while there wasn’t actual fault with the merchants. Now eBay will be removing feedback if: the listing meets the Customs Requirements and/or the seller receives a negative or neutral Feedback comment, which references customs delays or customs fees. Merchants in turn are obliged to advise the buyers that import duties, taxes and charges are not included in the item price or shipping charges. These charges are the buyer’s responsibility.

There was also a lot of frustration about eBay’s payment policy. Many were enraged by the favoritism showed to eBay-owned PayPal. eBay will reportedly now be adding Moneybookers and PayMate as acceptable methods of payment starting in February.

eBay users have been quite vocal in their displeasure with the famous auction site. It seems unlikely that many of them that have been so passionate will be willing to go back to eBay just because they finally acknowledged these issues. But the brand power that eBay carries does pull a lot of weight. Are you (or were you) an eBay seller? What do you think?

The study was a small one, involving just 15 people given imagery dollars for participating in auctions and lotteries. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists monitored brain activity, particularly the striata, the brain’s reward center, as the subjects carried out these scenarios. The brain scans showed the same mechanisms at work when winning either an auction or a lottery.

Losing, though, was where the key differences were. Losing a lottery was no big deal, but losing an auction caused a marked decrease in the brain’s reward centers, driving the subjects in subsequent auctions to bid more aggressively and drive up prices by overbidding. (If market speculators don’t come to mind immediately, you’re not thinking hard enough.)

The results go against previous notions of risk aversion or joy of winning being the driving forces for overbidding, suggesting fear of losing is the primary factor. Ars Technica’s Tim De Chant, in a post titled “Scientists discover why we overbid for old junk on eBay,” delivers this harrowing tidbit, coming in the wake of the apparent collapse of Nixonian economics, which the proposed fear-based federal bailout would seek to artificially perpetuate:

The results, the authors say, were not predicted by current economic theory. Similar neuroscience studies, they added, may eventually help shape new advances in economic theory.  

So, keep that in mind the next time you bid at an auction, online or off: losing may not be as painful as the potential emptiness in your wallet. 

_{*I know that sounds a bit obtuse, but in light of certain recent economic crises, where economists who believed theoretically-existent people would buy a bunch of houses with theoretically existent (faith-based) currency are now requesting reasonable people who don’t like existing in theoretical constructions to print money and create credit so these economists’ greed-based faiths can be realized and so all is not lost—does cat food sound appetizing to you? they ask—the fear of losing idea seems especially relevant.}
 

But he did manage to schlep it off to a New Zealand pizza joint called Hell Pizza for just under four grand—not a bad price to pay for hella worldwide publicity, is it? As for 24-year-old Walter Scott, an appropriate asking price for a soul is pretty much set by the free market, and since "he had not found it to be much use," then $3,800 is probably pretty good for nothing.

Scott, though not entirely original—in "O Brother, Where Art Thou," Tommy Jones sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads just because he wasn’t using it—probably got a better price for his soul than his Internet predecessors, of which there are many. He learned, like the others, Internet auction sites everywhere won’t let a person sell their soul if they can help it; Scott brokered his deal with Hell Pizza offline.

Shortly after eBay became a household name, reports went out all over the media about a similar auction. eBay pulled it for good reason: In the event there is such a thing as an immortal soul, it violates eBay’s policy against selling body parts; if there isn’t such a thing, then it violates eBay’s policy against selling nothing. Such reasoning is sound enough, too, to prevent eBay from taking a stand one way or the other.

Pretty much every similar story ends the same way, with the auction site canceling the sale. Scott’s posting on TradeMe was pulled, the highest legitimate bid coming in at $456. Hell Pizza matched the highest bogus bid, a reward for bad behavior being the obvious thing to do.

In 2006, a Chinese man tried the same thing, attracting generous bids as high as $116.80 before the auction company pulled the plug, citing a trespass on God’s territory. He sold it eventually to a female journalist for an undisclosed price.

What do you wanna bet it was Ann Coulter?

At any rate, let this situation settle it forever: No, you can’t sell your soul on eBay, or any other auction site for that matter, and no, it’s not clever anymore, even if it nets you a few bills in the end guaranteed news coverage. Heck, they once sold the heck out of a pet rock; people will buy any old thing so long as you tell the right story about it. As for my soul, I think I’ll keep it. It comes in handy at karaoke.

^{*The companion law of the Law of Cool is the Law of Not Funny Anymore, which applies to catch phrases like "NOT!" "MILF," and "You are the weakest link, goodbye." If you didn’t think of it yourself, it’s only funny and cool when it’s an early or obscure reference to some burgeoning pop culture phenomenon—and no, monkeys won’t ever fly out of your butt, nor will you be funny for sarcastically suggesting they might.}  

**Not to be confused with girl-who’s-drunk-too-early-and-will-likely-lose-her-top status, which will be cool forever, any language, any culture.
 

Without the ad auction, millions of keywords would have to be priced by hand. Google’s Hal Varian said on the official Google blog the task would be impossible.

"Using an auction removes the burden of having to do this: the prices are determined by the auction participants," Varian said. "These auctions run every time a user enters a query, so they always reflect the current values that advertisers place on keywords."

In the process, where all of the ads for a particular keyword have the same Quality Score ranking, the bidding process determines the order of presentation for those ads. The high bidder gets the best placement.

The key to Google’s rich profits, though Varian doesn’t refer to it this way, comes from the bidding process. "Advertisers bid for position and pay just enough to beat their runner-up. Prices for keywords are, ultimately, determined by the advertisers," he said.

As in most things in life, whoever has the most money wins. Webmasters with smaller sites competing against a richer one for the same keywords will lose each time, unless the deeper-pocketed business has a bunch of incompetents handling the bid-setting process.

The key for smaller sites in competition is the same online as it is in the physical world. One isn’t going to run a small hardware store alongside a Wal-Mart and hope to beat them on price. But if they fill a niche the big competitor does not address, say for a specific tool for a unique purpose, they have a chance.

That applies to keyword buys. If you’re running headfirst into the maw of a wealthier competitor, you might need to rethink your business model. All trying to outspend such a foe does is to make Google richer. Bid smart.

Lower insertion fees for the first three tiers of media categories give sellers a little relief, as they made enough complaints to prompt eBay to move quickly on that issue. But eBay will not back off its feedback changes.

Sellers can kick and scream all they want about the new feedback system, but that isn’t going to change. The best discounts for sellers from the Detailed Seller Rating (DSR) program means sellers will have to impress buyers on several points.

One of those points directly hits sellers in their wallets. Buyers can rate shipping and handling charges as one of the DSR factors.

As pointed out on the Bits Blog, buyers have long complained about huge shipping fees. Ebay’s Lorrie Norrington, President of eBay Global Marketplace Operations, said in a message from the company the changes focus on improving buyer trust in the marketplace.

A noble statement, but Norrington left out the other part of the shipping fees issue. Sellers routinely jack up shipping fees in order to skirt eBay’s Final Value Fees, which are a percentage of the closing price.

Shipping fees are not part of the Final Value equation, and sellers quickly realized they could offer an item at a lower price and make up some profits on shipping. If you ever wondered how a $6 shipping fee for a book manifested itself as a $1.38 stamp on an envelope, in an example I’ve seen, now you know where the other $4.62 ended up: in the seller’s pocket and out of eBay’s reach.

eBay will turn buyers into a de facto shipping police force through the DSR program. If sellers price shipping as a profit center, buyers who deal with those sellers may choose to knock the shipping cost portion of the DSR down in response.

A survey at Auction Bytes found sellers consider feedback changes as having the most impact on their business. 98.3 percent said this impact would be negative.

eBay did not have much of a choice but to finally act on buyer perceptions about high shipping fees making eBay a bad deal. Norrington said they will monitor the data associated with the program, and eBay will take action if buyer trust fails to improve.

Current bid is $100, which is where the bidding began. There’s still nearly two days left, though.

Highlytargeted’s pitch begins with ways marketing data can be flawed or skewed. He (because our anonymous seller mentions his wife, we assume "he," though we all know other genders can have wives in some areas) offers instead his actual anonymized targeting information marketers can use to send him messages via email for 30 days.

With his feedback of how effective they are, of course.

So what does the auction winner get for their money? Here’s the list:

·  My past 30 days internet search queries
·  My past 90 days web surfing history
·  My past 30 days online and offline purchase activity
·  My Age, Gender, Ethnicity, Marital status, and Geo location
·  The right to target one ad per day to me for 30 days

So what’s that type of information worth? We’ll see in a couple of days. At least it appears to be for a good cause. The seller says he’s donating the proceeds to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

“The goal behind the re-org was to help us rationalize and consolidate duplicative products, create greater focus on key priorities, clarify strategic direction, and ultimately develop an environment where we could accelerate the speed and quality of our decision-making,” Weiner said in his post on the Yahoo Yodel blog.

Weiner has a number of Yahoo’s most trafficked properties under his purview: Mail, Search, Answers, and the Yahoo home page itself. If it’s facing the Internet user, it’s probably under the Network Division.

Putting them in one division may have caused some to question that move. He said in response: “The answer to that question lies no further than our mission statement: ‘To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world

Our own David Utter reached this conclusion when he wrote about Yahoo Auctions on Tuesday – note the graph at the bottom of his article.  A few hours later, Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott released her own data for a different period of time.  Taken together, these two reports indicate, without any room for doubt, that “Ebay [is] at 94% Share of Category.”

“EBay is the largest e-commerce site in the downstream for Yahoo! Search, at 1.34% of Yahoo! Search’s total downstream for the week ending May 5, 2007,” wrote Prescott.  “In comparison, Yahoo! Auctions accounted for only 0.01% of the traffic leaving Yahoo! Search in that period.”  So Yahoo’s offering was admittedly a very minor competitor, but it was a competitor nonetheless.

Then there’s the rumored eBay-StumbleUpon deal.  As Kara Swisher suggested, “the online marketplace powerhouse shows a little more leg in its deal-in-the-making to pay way too much for a trendy Internet Web page discovery and recommendation service.”  If eBay does, in fact, fork over $75 million for StumbleUpon, that display will be still more impressive.

But for now, eBay execs may remain content to have vanquished Yahoo.  It is indeed an accomplishment, and, considering how far behind eBay’s closest competitors are, the auction site appears to have achieved a more permanent immortality than the “Highlander” franchise ever did.