The corner can be dug Buy.com challenge ebay's reasons

Introduction: Gartner's analyst Gene Alvarez believes that social networking has the potential to change online retailing patterns. And Buy.com's actions seem to be trying to verify this statement. It takes social networking as an online peer-to-peer marketing tool. For those with an ebay platform, their peer-to-peer sales could be drastically altered by Buy.com's latest junk sales tool (garage Sale). Buy.com has to cut off the middleman, the elimination of transaction fees to increase the popularity of the way. Its competition with ebay is clear. Many online companies and individuals have been operating on ebay for many years, and most of them have been hit by internet trading bottlenecks. In fact, EBay's growth was mainly through international expansion. Is ebay's bottleneck really a third party breakthrough? And challenge ebay's very clear goal: the first users to poach from ebay, let ebay buyers and sellers move to the social network, and to buy.com the odds geometry?

Patented technology preemptive

The Junk Sales tool (Garage Sale), in short, is a widget that blends into social networks such as Facebook or MySpace. With it, buyers and sellers on the homepage of sites such as Facebook, where they first contacted them, can complete the transaction. Buy.com says the garage Sale platform is based on patented technology that has not been applied. Part of the technology comes from the shoperion business technology company that was purchased earlier. Shoperion's technology is designed to provide advertisers, publishers and retailers with innovative ways to use the web. These applications can be attached to the Web page to help people sell goods, increase traffic, investigate and get paid. And unlike the traditional display of embedded ads, users can always stay at the publisher site. Some social networking sites also provide widgets that can display a transaction list on a profile page. However, there is still a need to access electronic trading sites such as ebay to complete the transaction. Therefore, after acquiring Shoperion, Buy.com's ability and advantage to advertise in the third party site are greatly enhanced.

Ebay has also been aware of the possibilities that social networking can offer. For a long time, ebay has considered community members to be its strongest asset. In order to strengthen the community spirit, a series of activities, from the office of the ebay magazine to play on the real ebay TV programs have tried. In May, ebay also invested directly in social networks and search engines. It bought a search WEB2.0 company StumbleUpon with 75 million dollars. The site can be based on people's preferences for video, pictures, content and other types of sites to recommend. The site is recommended by the user. Its slogan is "meeting people with the same interests and discovering what others are finding." "Call on friends to connect and share each other's favorite sites." There are currently 3,131,082 recommended sites for this network. But an ebay series of actions has not had enough impact on social networking users.

And Buy.com's invasion of ebay's territory is on ebay, where the trading giant is preparing to set up buying and selling basic data, adjusting the cost model and adding more features that would help the buyer accurately describe its products.

Huge growth Opportunities

Revenue generated from the audience----This is the common ideal of all social networking sites. And how to achieve will be recount. Buy.com's capital mining is based on the fact that many ebay users maintain files on other popular sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and often recommend their deals on these file pages. But anyone who is interested in a list of deals must trade on ebay. And now, through the Buy.com Garage sales tool (Garage Sale), do not jump, in situ can be carried out.

After Facebook users register and download the Junk Sales tool (garage Sale) to their profile page, they can list the sales list. On the widget you can list the name of the item, a brief description, a price, a photo, and a "link to the cart". If the transaction is made, the program will be credited from the buyer's credit card, remitted to the seller's PayPal account, or directly issue the payment bill.

Buy.com's CEO, Neel Grover, called this "embedded E-business solution" the initiative. "Garage sale allows customers to become personal online retailers," he said. We see tremendous growth opportunities in the ability to offer businesses to millions of users and to make their profile pages available for information sharing. ”

Carrie Johnson, an analyst at Forrester Research, said: "When retailers seek to make up for social networks, where the recommendation from the Internet user base is a very strong buying force, and a way to divide the business, a social-business experiment like this will emerge." ”

To "MLM" refueling

If we understand the MLM as word of mouth between acquaintances. Then there is no doubt that the WEB2.0 era is the golden period of MLM. "Recommendation" will create huge economic benefits.

"Personal referrals are very important to consumers," says Carrie Johnson, an analyst at Forrester Research. The biggest e-commerce players, especially Amazon and ebay, have long recognized the importance of establishing connections between users. He specifically mentions Amazon's consumer reviews. Even a lot of companies seek to use personal blogs to drive traffic, and for products and sites aroused contention.

Applying garage Sale, buyers and sellers understand each other, which is the difference between garage Sale and other online business channels such as Craigslist. And there's a difference with the business section on Facebook where users can list the widgets on their profile pages, but buyers don't necessarily know who the sellers are.

With the improvement of the function, the final garage Sale users should be able to retrieve the external network. Consumers are also able to get tips on what their friends are selling. Garage sale is not Buy.com's first attempt at social networking. The company has its own social shopping site yub.com.

Lower costs

Unlike ebay, Buy.com does not charge a list fee, but imposes a 5% fixed rate on the final sales price. Ebay collects lists and final transaction fees. At present, any exchange can only be done via email, but Buy.com is seeking to allow users to bargain with sellers and read buyers ' comments on the file page.

Powerful combination of viral transmission

Buy.com says the service will first be embedded in Facebook and will be swept into other social networking platforms in the future. Garage sale will send other sites to the code and apply the way to make it more widely used. And in the quarter of this year, Buy.com will begin to apply. Buy.com's CEO predicts that this service is good for social networking sites because it encourages users to spend more time looking after their profile pages. and help users to sell things without having to jump to the ebay page.

"Garage Sale sounds like a good idea in theory," said Sucharita Mulpuru, a researcher at the Forrester Research Institute. They can create a network where people can buy and sell their own belongings. Then it could become an ebay terminator. No one has been able to compete with ebay in the line-trading market. ”

Buy.com's CEO, Neel Grover, said: "If Buy.com can embed garage Sale in different social networks, we can certainly become ebay's competitors." We are not creating a site for people to go to, but to reach all the places where there is traffic. ”

(Invited to compile: Shi Ying)