Youtube --> Metacafe Myspace --> Facebook Yahoo --> Google Gamespot --> IGN McDonalds --> Burger King Heck EVERY idea has a copy/competitor that sells (or offers) the same exact features , and both do extremely well. So how come there is no true competitor to eBay? What makes eBay so special? Or why do people refuse to accept an alternative? I think we should try and tackle this. I know there are some alternatives to eBay, but let's face it, none are any good. I have some ideas to throw around to make a great eBay competitor, and I need about 2 other people to help me out. You don't have to be a master coder or marketing genius; let's face it, not everyone is. If you have some great ideas and/or can help out financially, that is fine. Post here if interested. And let me be clear: no Peons will be considered. I prefer you to be a US citizen or at least have English as your first language.
What is your budget?? Because I think that their brand is to well known!! and besides, who eats at Burger King??
Of course eBay is hugely known, but look at Youtube. Metacafe was around before them, and they managed to come out of nowhere. A even better example is Google. Yahoo was a GIANT and somehow Google came out and is now one of the largest corporations on the planet.
I am ready to get involved, ive got unlimited hosting and domains so they can come in handy, im not good at coding but do know a great site for like templates from templatemonster and scripts and all the rest of it.
Avoid "unlimited" hosting like the plague, it is based on a poor business model of assumptions. The "problem" with an auction site is that it is very similar to any user contribution based site that it needs to be popular to become popular. If you wanted to sell a book on photography are you going to post a 7 day auction on a site that has 100 daily users so low probability of getting a lot of people bidding against each other or one that has millions? To combat it you need either to use a massively known brand to piggy back off of, multi-millions to spend on advertising and incentives or be the worlds best at viral marketing. There have been competitors to eBay, originally it was Yahoo!Auctions (they pulled out of the UK market but dont know about the USA), but before it all took off eBay had the big advantage of also having PayPal which naturally both gave them another revenue stream plus with the strong links between the two enabled cross marketing - if someone had a couple of pounds in their PayPal account they can either mess about setting up payment systems and get the money transfered and a week later be able to buy a pack of fags or buy a couple of new CDs or such and get them just as quickly. Any real competor must have a billion plus to blow over a couple of years or markably move from the operating model to be able to resolve the issue of a lack of visitors naturally resulting in much lower sale prices.
Note that most (sometimes HUGE) competitors in most countries were bought by ebay. In my country there is a marketplace which is much much (much) more popular than ebay is here; they were bought by them and left alone to continue as they were. Doesn't look anything like ebay, but everyone is using them here.
There two biggies that tired and failed. Yahoo had a great auction site and they offered it for free. It was pretty big and I made a lot of money on there. They decided to start charging fees so everyone, including me just went back to eBay. Amazon was another one who tried to compete with eBay, They offered the 10 cent listings. They did OK at first but could not draw the large numbers like eBay so they dropped the auction. It is a big battle to fight so you better have some huge money to invest for it to work.