

Outraged eBay sellers plan boycott - dcurtis
http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/07/smbusiness/ebay_boycott.fsb/index.htm?postversion=2008021009

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iamelgringo
When, oh, when will someone develop a decent competitor to Ebay? The site is
awful and is ripe for a startup to carve away market share. They've already
proven the business model. We know it makes money. I know the boys at
auctomatic are doing their best to help out, but what's needed is a full on
competitor.

I mean, really. How hard is it to offer a couple of decent looking templates
for people to make their own site, to that it isn't such an eyesore? How hard
is it to implement a better form of search and categorization? How hard is it
to develop a form of authentication to cut down on all the fraud that takes
place on Ebay?

The last time I used Ebay or thought it was decent was back in 97-98. The site
hasn't changed much since.

We should have a challenge to see who can develop the best Ebay competitor.

~~~
gruseom
_The last time I used Ebay or thought it was decent was back in 97-98. The
site hasn't changed much since._

Someone who consulted there told me that eBay's codebase was a mess (even by
the usual standards) and that they had some strange processes that made it
worse. If I recall correctly, programmers weren't allowed to work in teams and
were frequently 'rotated' through completely unrelated projects. He told me
some other weird things that I don't remember, but that combined to form an
impression that eBay's culture is really inimical to hackers. That would
explain their technical stagnation. But overwhelming market share gives them
powerful inertia.

~~~
pg
Back in the 1998 at Yahoo we used to hear shocking things about how bad eBay's
systems were. One of the externally visible signs was their policy of having
several hours a week of scheduled downtime. That seemed just inexcusable. Do
they still do that?

I think the reason eBay is so inept is that they were a monopoly almost from
the beginning. So at a stage when other startups (Google for example) had to
work hard to succeed, they were already coasting, at least technically.

