Jimmosk

How Does the Boycott Impact eBay?

Sorry, Timothy Church, but you're giving out one piece of pretty misleading information.

Every once in a while eBay has a "listing sale", where they dramatically reduce the cost to list an item for a day, and millions of new listing are posted. They expire, most of them a week later, and the site returns to its previous average, more or less.

On the Wednesday before the boycott started, eBay chose to have one of those sales (whether it was in anticipation of the boycott or not I don't know). So the only reason volume was at 15 million the weekend before the boycott was that there had been a large spike midweek before - which as always was followed by a sharp drop seven days later. That's what accounts for the bulk of the drop, not the boycott.

You can see what's going on very clearly at the <A HREF="www.medved.net/cgi-bin...">chart here</A>. The 13th was Listing Sale Day; most of those listings expired on the 20th. The boycott began on the 18th.

(Here's hoping this commentbox accepts html)

Amazon vs. eBay: Battle of the Online Auctions

I don't understand how you can call this a "Battle of the Online Auctions" when Amazon does not have auctions, and hasn't for years! They are strictly for fixed-price sales, which is essentially the opposite of an auction...

There's an article about the sad fate of Amazon's attempt at offering auctions, here: glinden.blogspot.com/2...

While there are other actual-auction sites, they're pretty tiny by comparison, so eBay remains the only auction game in town.