Sunday, November 18, 2007

Hey Ebay Man!


Helloooo blogosphere!! Here's a random money making idea:

It's called "priceofXYZonebay.com" where XYZ can be any product such as magic cards or hummels.

Hummels are these cute little figurines like the one pictured here.

Now lately, I've been selling a bunch of them, and I was noticing how hard it is to find out how much they cost. Also, I noticed if I knew how much a certain hummel cost, and found one for cheap, I could do an "ebay flip".

So let me just get to the idea. I want to build a site priceofhummelsonebay.com. It's so simple. It would retrieve the latest prices for all the hummels on ebay. When one is about to be sold for less than the average price, then the software would alert me and I could go buy the thing and resell it for a higher price.

But wait! that means I have to do the work of receiving and selling the hummels. So here's the extra idea, I "sell" access to this list to the highest bidder. For a share of the listings a user can get up to date, last minute, notifications that a cheap hummel is about to be sold. The system does not send notifications to any other users about those hummels until someone else offers me more money for access to the listings.

So here's an example:
Joe is browsing the site, looking at prices for hummels, but the price quotes are delayed by a day. He decides to buy access to the up to date prices for 10 types of hummels at $5 per month. During the month, the system alerts him that 5 hummels are cheap. Joe buys them and flips them for a profit of $5 per hummel. Joe is very happy. That is until Harry comes along. Harry wants in on the action and is willing to pay $10 for the alerts. The system let's Harry do it and kicks Joe out of the action. Then Harry begins to get notifications and Joe does not.

And the great thing is that this pattern can be repeated for many, many types of items without extra work.

What do you think?

3 comments:

Tim said...

you could just call it "priceofitonebay.com," mimicking eBay's own "it" commercials. then, you wouldn't even have to make extra sites. or just redirect priceofitonebay.com/hummels to priceofhummelsonebay.com.

the bidding for the lists part is what makes it a bit complicated. a reduced-complexity model would be to charge a flat service fee. of course, then you'd have to scramble the item names and numbers, so as not to give them away for free.

then again, an auction for auctions is just the type of meta madness that belongs in web 2.0

Unknown said...

Doesn't EBay already have a way to look at the price of recently completed items? So really all you are doing is aggregating the results and coming up with market trends. I did a quick google search and it seems that Ebay also offers this service: http://developer.ebay.com/programs/marketdata/

Greg said...

Yea, but you have to know how to pose the search parameters. I think the sites could make it 5 clicks easier for the average user and get some value. Also the site would provide alerts and maybe automatic buying.