Subject:
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Re: Good things about E-Bay ...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 11 Feb 1999 16:54:18 GMT
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Viewed:
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347 times
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On Thu, 11 Feb 1999 04:18:11 GMT, lehman@javanet.com (Todd Lehman)
wrote:
> But is 5-10 minutes really enough time to make a true difference? What if
> you're sleeping, or eating dinner, or in a meeting at work, or really really
> constipated? Or what if you're on a modem and your connection drops a
> couple times?
The 5-10 minute works to disable people who snipe in the last 30 seconds
or so. When people slam in bids with less than 1 minute left in the
auction, it's extremely challenging for anyone to re-bid in time.
With a 5-10 minute last-bid-before-closing delay, the auction turns into
a real-time auction. Which is more fair than a snipers-encouraged
auction, but still could require people to sit at their computer at odd
hours to win the auction.
> IME, anything less than 12 hours is a recipe for frustration among bidders.
True, I think online auctions are best served up as non-realtime,
generally for both sellers and buyers. Are they best for the middleman
(eBay)? I'd say yes. Even if auctions do drag on longer, does that
seriously impact the systems required to admin the auction site? I'd
guess not. Let's see:
Since auctions would take longer, there would be more concurrent
auctions. This would require a larger database, so more hard-drive
space is needed. Hard drives are cheap.
What about number of bids? I don't know if that would increase. I'd
guess it might, as people get into late-auction bidding wars with small
max-bid increments. So more hardware is needed, to handle more
transactions.
Inquiries would increase, because I'd guess the rate of inquiries would
be more-or-less constant. Since auctions would last longer, the total
number of inquiries-per-auction would increase (another way to say this
is the total number of concurrent auctions would increase, so people
would look at more auctions, increasing total inquiries). Again, an
increase of hardware may be needed to handle the inquiries.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if eBay's structure is a
marketing decision. Think about it--allowing auctions to run their
natural course is more fair, but it also increases the total number of
active auctions. Even in cyber-space, there's only so much room on the
shelf to get people's attention. If there are 100 auctions running
(that I'm interested in), but I can only focus on 10, I'm missing 90% of
the auctions. But if there are only 50 auctions-of-interest running,
I'm missing 80%. If the total number of auctions over time is constant,
it's to eBay's advantage to present them in small amounts, so I can
focus on more of them, overall. (am I making sense?)
Steve
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Good things about E-Bay ...
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| (...) But is 5-10 minutes really enough time to make a true difference? What if you're sleeping, or eating dinner, or in a meeting at work, or really really constipated? Or what if you're on a modem and your connection drops a couple times? BTW, (...) (26 years ago, 11-Feb-99, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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