Why doesn't Google make an eBay competitor?
If not Google, maybe Marissa can re-launch Yahoo Auctions. It works in Japan.
3 comments
Google generally dislikes business models that require providing customer support or are hard to replicate at enormous scale.
Their biggest consumer facing products, Adwords and Gmail, focus on a single, infinitely repeatable, 0 cost product and have very little support available.
There's an upper limit to how profitable a consumer to consumer marketplace can be, as seen by eBay's shift away from c2c and more towards wholesale/business sellers.
Seems like a niche/startup player would be ripe to capture some of eBay's market share, as etsy, 1stdibs, etc do, but getting that initial momentum is hard, as is supporting a c2c marketplace's rabble of buyers, sellers and scammers.
Their biggest consumer facing products, Adwords and Gmail, focus on a single, infinitely repeatable, 0 cost product and have very little support available.
There's an upper limit to how profitable a consumer to consumer marketplace can be, as seen by eBay's shift away from c2c and more towards wholesale/business sellers.
Seems like a niche/startup player would be ripe to capture some of eBay's market share, as etsy, 1stdibs, etc do, but getting that initial momentum is hard, as is supporting a c2c marketplace's rabble of buyers, sellers and scammers.
I would love someone to kick eBay and PayPal out of place. I've had too many annoyances/troubles with them. The problem is they offer buyer protection, so unless you got tons of cash to back up a site, you really can't compete. Hopefully someone will prove me wrong.
I suppose Google wants to do no evil nor set up an infrastructure where evil could be conducted. Think about it, half the "stuff" on eBay is crap and the other half is fake crap. Perhaps Google wants no part of all that drama per their mission statement.
My apologies for posting this
You could say the same thing about email. By that logic why would they bother with gmail? I can't believe that google doesn't build ebay because systems with spam are somehow evil.
There are low quality goods for sale definitely but there are also many reasonably priced quality items.
There are low quality goods for sale definitely but there are also many reasonably priced quality items.