eBay is rolling a new feature on their site called eBay My World (or at least I think it is new since I haven’t seen this in the past). You can check out my eBay My World page to get a sense of all the functionality they are pulling into one single page including Feedback Ratings, eBay listings, eBay blog posts, and biographical information.
Author: golf Page 19 of 22
WOMMA (The Word of Mouth Marketing Association) is holding its next Word of Mouth Marketing Summit in Washington, D.C. on December 12 and 13. It should be a great event. There will be more than 70 speakers, several big-name authors, and three incredible keynotes all talking about word of mouth marketing.
If you are interested in word of mouth, viral, buzz, or blog marketing, you should try to make it to this conference. You can register online at www.womma.org/summit2.
Today, buySAFE announced a new partnership with The St. Paul Travelers Companies, one of the largest financial institutions in the world with more than $113 billion in assets.
The new Travelers relationship adds another major U.S. financial institution to buySAFE’s growing team of business partners. The Hartford Financial Services Group and The Rutherfoord Companies are major investors in buySAFE, and in 2005, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company joined with buySAFE to provide significant surety bond capacity for buySAFE’s rapidly growing business on eBay, Overstock.com, and TIAS.
Last week, Ina Steiner documented the basic story of ‘Feedback Farms’ on eBay.
I have to be honest, these scams continue to amaze me, and one has to conclude that these scams are damaging and undermining the entire feedback/merchant rating system. If fraudsters can so easily create feedback/merchant ratings in the thousands, then buyers will have to increase their vigilance online. From a buyer’s point of view, it continues to be more and more difficult to truly discern good from bad.
I recently spoke at Wharton, and one of the students asked if I could periodically post on my experiences as an entrepreneur. I thought it was a great idea, and so here is my first of many thoughts on entrepreneurship.
Phishtank is an interesting new anti-phishing service that recently launched to the public. Brian Krebs of the Washington Post reviewed Phishtank, and I agree with many of his assessments.
The service is a great idea, and I like many facets of it. I have always been a big fan of leveraging the collective knowledge of the community to identify and fight the bad guys.
My one issue with the service is the fact that they publish the URLs of the malicious sites on their home page. People are pretty naive, and there are lots of people that will find this interesting and decide to visit these sites in their browser. The problem is that these sites often attempt to exploit browser flaws, and surfers can fall victim to them by simply viewing the websites. Obviously, publishing the URLs of the suspected malicious sites is not a great idea.
Still, I encourage you to check out the Phishtank (don’t visit the malicious sites though), and if you find a suspicious website, make sure you add it to the Phishtank.
Greg Isaacs, Director of eBay’s Developers’ Program, is leaving eBay after more than five years at the firm. No announcement yet on what Greg will be doing, but one thing is for sure, he will be missed at eBay.
Good luck Greg.
The following blog post provides basic, wise advice on how to avoid eBay / PayPal email scams.
"eBay and eMail Scams" at keep my engine running…
If you are interested in eBay, this blog is worth keeping tabs on.
Related blog posts:
"Top 10 Tips to Avoid Phishing Scams and Identity Theft"
"Richard Clarke’s Views on Identity Theft" at Fraud, Phishing and Financial Misdeeds
I ran across a case study this morning that discusses the opportunities and threats of online auctions, and it specifically focuses on the online auction site, eBid.
The author is Khurram Memon of DeMontfort University. I believe that as you continue to wrap your head around what is currently happening with the eBay marketplace and what you can expect with other eCommerce channels in the future, this will be an interesting case study for you to read.
Related blog posts, case studies, and presentations:
- "What is a ‘Market for Lemons’?" blog post
- "What’s Wrong With eBay? It’s Simple Economics" blog post
- "buySAFE. Creating and Profiting from the Bonded Seller Advantage " case study by Dr. Eric Clemons, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
- "Building Buyer Confidence: The Economics of Information Asymmetry & Signaling" presentation at 2006 MIVA Small Business Conference
- "Everyone’s a Critic. Not So Fast" blog post by Jeff Grass, buySAFE
I have had a number of eBay merchants write me about a post that I made earlier this week suggesting that eBay seems to be displaying the early signs of a Market for Lemons problem (Some would argue it is far beyond the beginning stages, but I will let you debate that with your comments below).
Without focusing on eBay or eCommerce in general, it has been requested that I illustrate a simple example of how a “Market for Lemons” develops. Obviously, there is a lot of academic research on this subject (I posted a Wharton case study by Dr. Eric Clemons earlier this week, and you won’t want to miss it since it discusses eBay’s challenges in greater depth.), and almost everybody has heard the “Market for Lemons” term utilzed at some point. Wikipedia provides a basic overview of the Market for Lemons economic concept, so I won’t regurgitate what you can read elsewhere.
In short, the “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism” is a paper written by George Akerlof in 1970 that describes what happens to markets that suffer from information asymmetry problems. Ultimately, Dr. Akerlof won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 (along with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz) for his analysis of markets with information asymmetry. While I was at Wharton, I was fascinated by the implications of this research on eCommerce marketplaces.