Building businesses on top of businesses, the AuctionRover example

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

This article was heard April 9, 2000, on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WCAP in Lowell, Mass., and is syndicated on WBNW in Boston and WPLM in Plymouth, Mass, and is also available as RealAudio at www.thereport.com

Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. For details, see www.samizdat.com/consult.html.

I have fun and make some money selling junk from my attic at eBay and other auction sites. In the past, it was a bit difficult to run more than a couple dozen such auctions at once -- both because the recordkeeping became very time-consuming for these low-priced items, and also because of weaknesses in the ways auction sites were set up.

In particular, at eBay, you have no real control over the time of day that your auction will end. Yes, you can have your auction last 3 days or 5 days or 7 days, but whatever the time of day when you post your auction is the time of day when it will end. So if you only find the time to do this kind of thing in the wee hours of the morning, that's when your auction will end -- even though you'd love it to end on Sunday afternoon or a weekday at about 8 or 9 PM -- at a time when many people who might be interested in your item would be likely to be online and might want to dive in and get caught up in the last minute frenzy and make wonderful, irrationally high bids. And even if you can free yourself up to post auctions at the right hour of the day, doing so takes a finite time, so while you may have posted the first one at a good hour, by the time you get around to posting number 24, prime time may have past.

So I was delighted to discover that there's an auction support site, named AuctionRover.com, that has a free service known as Auction Manager that allows me to go through all the steps of creating auctions for any of the three main sites -- eBay, Amazon.com, or Yahoo -- and then schedule the day and the exact time of day when I'd like any or all of these auctions to actually be posted.

This same Auction Manager also makes it easier for me to set up my auctions, using a function that they call "inventory" which basically saves the description and settings for categories of auctions that I do often (like comic books or Davy Crockett cards), so I can create a new specific one with just a few edits. They also host my photos in a way that is easy for me to upload and easy for me to keep track of, and that serves up these photos far faster than Xoom, which is where I used to post them.

Auction Manager lets me see a display of all my auctions at all three major auction sites -- with the latest bid, the number of bids, even the number of hits (based on counters that I can add to any or all of my auctions with a single click), as well as how long is left until each of these auctions ends. And when auctions close, I get a display that helps guide me through all the followup steps of contacting the winner and receiving payment and sending the goods. I can even submit feedback on the winners with a simple click. I can set up standard emails to be sent to winners automatically. And when I am done, I can archive my closed auctions for future reference.

Thanks to this service, I can now handle about two or three times as many simultaneous auctions as before, reducing the time I spend on tedious tasks.

A few years ago, it looked like there was a gold rush on the Web -- with companies scrambling to lay claim to what seemed to be a limited number of niche markets. There would only be room for one or two or three players in each niche, and the ones who got there first would have an enormous advantage.

But the business environment of the Web keeps surprising us, with the creation of ever new opportunities. Here we have AuctionRover building a very useful and successful business on top of another set of successful businesses. Yes, eBay got there first with online auctions and became a mammoth success, which many other companies tried to imitate, without ever displacing them. But along comes an AuctionRover and builds a service that instead of competing with eBay, rides on top of it and its competitors -- a meta-auction site.

Similarly we saw meta-search engines come along to aggregate information from many different search engines. And we saw shopping bots or price comparison services rising to help make sense of the immense number of online stores. Success attracts enormous numbers of users and also many competitors with incremental improvements, which adds new complexity and creates problems which open opportunities for new meta businesses.

So rather than all the viable Internet niches being taken, and the gold rush ending; we see wave after wave of opportunity, as creative people keep come up with entirely new business models, over and over again. Don't you just love the Web?

Do you wish you could quickly search across dozens of auction sites with a single query, to check out what's available, how items are described, and what they are selling for? Try using the search box below. It will cover all the majors except eBay. Then you can choose to run the same query in eBay. (Awkward, yes. But, apparently, that's the way they have to do it to keep eBay happy.) We're an "affiliate" of GoTo Auctions; so if you launch your search from here, we'll get three cents for the referral. If enough of you do so, that could help us pay some bills and expand what we do for you.

Please send your comments and related suggestions to seltzer@samizdat.com

Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer

Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant.

Return to B&R Samizdat Express