Google vs. eBay/PayPal 197
That's Unpossible! writes "Google has today made a small announcement on their blog which could shake up the landscape of buying things online : they are going to start allowing certain parties to sell items through Google Base, which people can buy using credit cards linked to their Google Account. According to another blog post, Google already accepts payments in this fashion for Google Video, Google Earth, Google Store, etc. How long until Google Base is directly competing with eBay? The framework is now in place."
why is ebay singled out? (Score:3, Interesting)
It does give folks another avenue that the ebay 'buy-it-now' provides, but there isn't anything within the google framework that does the auction thing.
I mean, amazon provides the flea market thing as well...
Risky move (Score:1, Interesting)
eBay combined with Paypal currently is a fraudsters dream, its the worlds number 1 place to buy stolen (from burglary,robberys) merchandise and fake/counterfit goods, eBay try to keep a handle on it but with the shere size of the userbase and cashflow the incentive to crack down isnt really there and is probably impossible to stop,
iam suprised that the Police/FBI havent shut them down a long time ago for aiding and abetting, i guess that lobby money talks again
Re:This is nice but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft getting into the business financial software space
Microsoft getting into XXXX space
And the world thought the sky was falling, and Microsoft was going to take over everything and nobody else had a chance.
Ended up not being true. Away from their core businesses, Microsoft ended up being 'just another competitor'.
Will Google get away from their core, and have they same thing happen? Can the magic last?
eBay is very well entrenched...
Re:This is nice but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I would welcome a service where I could sell my stuff that was better than ebay. Keep in mind that there are a ton of services (be it a kitchen remodeling company or a restaurant in your town) that are ripe to be smashed by someone who comes in with a new business and provides better service...
Re:I, for one (seriously) (Score:5, Interesting)
I sold something on eBay, and opted to print out a UPS label, and pay for the shipping directly through their PayPal system. Started the process and everything was fine, I paid for it, and only needed to print the label out.
Crap! I didn't have the right kind of paper (I wanted to use label material) so I had to go find some in my wife's office.
By the time I got back, my session had timed out. I went back to my original eBay item, and followed the same process. Thinking that it would register as the same shipping/payment. Wrong, it charged me again.
Okay...fine, I'll just cancel the first one.
Can't cancel a shipping payment until UPS receives the electronic statement from PayPal. Okay, I'll check back the next day.
Whoops- can't cancel a shipping payment after 24 hours have passed.
eBay customer service did ONE thing for me when I contacted them about this. They confirmed that I was screwed.
$46 down the drain because their sessions time out too quickly. Fuck them...
Google is not evil (Score:2, Interesting)
So is google too big, yes but what does that mean?
Apparently they are so big, that when they do something in a certain market, all the other players are instantly obliterated. No this does not always happen, although this is what people think and expect I guess, basicly everyone is waiting for google to become evil, which is wierd.
In the end competition is good as long as there will remain competition.
All your base is overly broad (Score:3, Interesting)
PayPal have dug their own grave... (Score:4, Interesting)
I must admit, however, that having my personal information (name, CC, address) linked to my search queries seems like a profoundly bad idea... Even if that is still technically possible with my ISP I don't think they care enough, or it is in their best interests to do so. Google on the other hand...
Poppycock (Score:4, Interesting)
eBay has traditionally always had competition, and if anything this only helped it grow even larger. Look at Yahoo and Amazon, they couldn't even take it. The fact is that eBay is a differenet company now, than before. It's shifted it's focus from being an "auction" site, to being a marketplace.
Google is a great speculator, and it really has to be with the way it's stock is. A tighter integration of eBay and Google would be an intelligent move, eBay is a proven company, with rising stock for the last 10 years, and continuing to post profits well above expectations. PayPal, like it or not, is still the most reliable and easiest way to pay for things, and I'm sorry, but I've used it for well over 100 transactions and unlike my credit card and bank account, I dont pay an annual fees as a customer, and as a seller, it's a lot cheaper than the cost of getting a merchant account.
The point is this, eBay stands to lose ground in the market it's saturated. Google will have to figure out how to deal with fraud, customer/seller debate and at the same time promote it's product in a non-competitive manner such that it doesn't lose it's main advertiser.
Short of that, if Google decides to lock horns with eBay, I'm pretty sure you'll see eBay take a cut in it's stock to retain and regrow it's own markets. Competition is healthy, but I really doubt that this is anything more than posturing.
On an aside, pick a popular product, Froogle it, most of the vendors I've dealt with have had huge problems, lie or deliberately mislead me on price. Now add 10 million amateurs, wannabes, and fraudsters, and tell me that I can reasonably expect a better experience than eBay.
Well, mostly good... (Score:5, Interesting)
I do believe that it would be nice to get some real competition going for these companies - and perhaps Google has the chutzpah [wikipedia.org] to pull it off (not to mention the cash). I, for one, would love to see some new ideas in the auction/sell/pay space. It could also keep the costs of these services relatively in check, as well.
It costs a very large percentage of a sale to sell something on eBay (that is, unless you are a super-seller who can get away with selling an item for
Re:This is nice but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Poppycock (Score:4, Interesting)
There are two problems with your logic:
1) There's a reason eBay can spend 10M+ on Google Adwords. It makes far, far more. In 2004 [forbes.com], eBay had 3.3 billion in sales, and 780M in profits! Google needs less than 2% of the market to make up for the loss of advertising. Google has the brand awareness to easily grab 2% of that market.
2) It would assume eBay can afford to stop advertising with Google to get revenge upon Google. They can't. They would be shooting themselves in the foot, and giving Google Base more marketshare and more profits (see 1).
I think its more likely you'll see Google Base pages with Adword advertisements for eBay in the margin.
Ebay is a monopoly. (Score:2, Interesting)
This does not make for a healthy marketplace.
There is of course competition between sellers, but if ebay raises prices, makes it impossible to find items by completely eliminating categories, or decides that it'd rather heavily weight the market towards those who pay for featured ads, the users have no comeback, other than to not use ebay.
They can't just go to the 2nd highest auction site in many cases, as there effectively isn't one.
Competition would greatly help users.
Re:This is nice but... (Score:4, Interesting)
In five years will google APIs be as ingrained in your average website as windows is ingrained in your average desktop application? Google will continue to provide the framework for that to happen, ASAP. Think of it as Windows 3.0, with 3.1 coming soon. Unless wikipedia suddenly morphs into free maps and free storefronts and free classifieds and free file hosting and free email and free search, I don't see an open alternative to Google's free--as in beer-- content. You can mock the betas the same way people mocked early versions of Windows, but have no doubt that now as then, developers will use what is cheap and easy and available. It doesn't matter if it's coming out of Mountain View or Redmond as long as it pays the rent. Moral qualms are for Stallman.
Paypal is bad, but credit cards are worse (Score:2, Interesting)
As bad as you think the PayPal and EBay fees are, they a dwarfed by the blood credit cards suck out of our economy.
I'm not talking about the interest on unpaid accounts, I'm talking about the merchant fees. Those are the 2 to 6 percent fees that every merchant pays on credit card transactions.
These fees are hidden from the consumer, because the credit card mafia forces retailers to charge the same price for cash as well as credit card transactions. As a result, the retailers raise all prices to cover the cost, and even the person who doesn't have a credit card subsidises the system.
I believe the Fair Trade ministry in Australia rules this illegal there, and forced the listing of the credit card fee on the reciept, along with sales tax. If we adopted that system, the fees charged by credit card companies would be visible, and some people would choose to pay with cash instead -- thus allowing market pressure to do it's work.
If google's system is just a credit card processing web application, I won't be using it.
What is really needed is for someone to re-start PayPal's original business model. There were no fees, the company lived off the interest on money in the accounts. There was no need to provide your real name, it was all keyed to an email address and password.
Starting such a business would require getting over the "chicken and egg" hurdle -- there is no incentive to sign up for it unless there are other people in it to pay and bill. However, given the financial costs of the current system, it has to be done.
One way to do it would be for the small ebay sellers, who have the most to gain from this, to band together and do it themselves. We could form a company or association and each account holder could pay a small fee (such as $20) to get a voting membership or voting share -- if the charter specified that profits were divided equally among all accounts in a yearly dividend, the big sellers would have an incentive to keep costs down so they didn't simply subsidize the small guys.
I think the offering of credit should be done through a system similar to prosper.com. I think the offering of credit should be separated from the transaction system.
Re:Focus... (Score:4, Interesting)
Years later, we have google bundling all sorts of seperate software together, and constantly raising the price on them because there are no competitors. When some little search engine tries to get it's website registered, Google threatens to cut off ICANNs balls, and boom, that little search website only gets to be used via IP address. The list of abuses is insane.
And when that antitrust lawsuit was filed, who would have thought the DOJ prosecutor would be assassinated with a carbomb?
Re:PayPal have dug their own grave... (Score:3, Interesting)
Froogle is crap (Score:3, Interesting)
First off, there are people who spam the system with thousands of items (often directly, or redirecting to Amazon) where they say they're cheaper than everyone else. When you click on it, instead of being "$40", it is actually "$50". Often the first three or four links are spam like this - you can buy the item, but you're told it's one price and then it's another. When you e-mail Froogle help to report this fraud, they are very slow to respond, if they ever respond.
Another thing is Froogle has started this stupid thing where they group items together, so if yous search for say "onetouch ultra strips", you'll get a first response where it says "Compare 47 prices" currently. But when I click on that I see not only OneTouch Ultra strips but Basic Profile strips, and Surestep strips. I click on the 2nd link, "OneTouch SureStep Test Strips, 50 ea" from Drugstore.com, and nowhere in that page does it say Ultra. Now if I put Ultra in my search, and there are dozens of pages which have those 3 words in my search, why am I being redirected to a page that does not have Ultra? This is not a case of spam, this is a case of Google screwing up.
I actually have a store that has Froogle entries, people get redirected to my store on a false thing like this (the ultra to drugstore.com surestep thing), buy it and then want to cancel their credit card sale or want to send it back, because they think I screwed up somehow, when actually it was Froogle and they who screwed up. Froogle should get rid of this stupid, broken new system and put back the old system where when you looked for the word ultra you'd actually wind up with a product or blurb that had the word ultra in it. I'm using "onetouch ultra strips" as an example, but this goes across many products.
These are both major problems, so I won't even go into minor ones like how they're rating system for merchants has problems. The thing about Froogle is both of the problems I mentioned are new - their search system was working fine until they added this new grouping thing which doesn't work and which I'm sure no one likes. Don't put it out there until it works. And spammers were not around, but now they are, and Froogle doesn't deal with them. If they wait a week to deal with them each time, then they will never go away - if they can get a few hundred sales for each week on the fake prices, I'm sure the spammers will just set up a new storefront each week and make a ton of money. They should fix what's broken instead of coming out with whiz-bang new features every few months. Respond to e-mails about people spamming with fake low prices.