Auction World
Consolidating the smaller Auction sites.
The iron is hot for the striking, in fact it's blazing red hot. Right or wrong, there's another "shake down" happening in the Auction World. It's time for someone, anyone, to readjust the online auction game.
It is all about the long waited web evolution where static web sites from the nineties step down and give the freedom to community driven, user-centric, multi-channel distributed, search engine independent, next-generation, cross-platform concepts, applications and programs. Obviously, the web transforms, but what is next? Perhaps the innovations below might give you the answer.
Someone with a couple million dollars needs to find and use the synergies among the growing multitude of independent online Auction sites. It is not about someone trying to buy them all in an attempt to sew them together. What is needed to completely change the playing field is for one single entity to create a one stop pipeline where all the smaller auction sites can be found.
All that would be needed is a good healthy rack of first rate server space, a top notch administrative team and a small but talented sales force that can sell the benefits of a unified effort.
All the small sites would remain fully independent, they'd just have a closer relationship with their retail neighbours. They would each retain their individual ownership, their administrative teams, their chosen payment systems, either Google Checkout, PayPal or their own merchant accounts.
The new entity would be like the common area in the interior of a shopping mall. It would be a routing facility with click through, directly to dozens and possibly hundreds of smaller independent sub malls. Eventually, it would become a simple task to solicit click through deals with larger retailers also.
Coordinating the top twelve independent auction type sites would assemble an active user base of about two million people. The harvest is ready, the tree is being shaken and some of the finest fruit has already become ripe for the picking. The right person with the right plan could really pull off a major, effective and extremely profitable business.
Something like this will end up knocking eBay down a bit while becoming very successful in its own right....if done properly. A portal where feeds from all auction sites as well as retail sites end in items showing on one site, that can be sorted by fixed price, auction, reverse auction, best offer etc., would be a great site for buyers. Such a site would also spider shopping sites that are not submitted.
What investors and eBay huggers fail to see is that this type of site WILL be built....it's just a matter of when. When it is built, and built correctly, it will level the playing field a bit. A site such as this that becomes popular will mean that shoppers no longer just check eBay because of the time factor, or the greatest inventory factor. This type of site would allow buyers to have the massive results of shopping through a straight Google search, without having to weed out all of the other results that have nothing to do with products for sale.
It is a matter of when such a site will be built.
We are talking about sharing, in order to help a company grow and be profitable using approaches in favour of common effort, this creates a rising tide that lifts all. A solution for users (companies) to consolidate some contact points into a single unified communications strategy. Unified communications reduces all those separate elements to a single infrastructure.
This gives companies access to a global marketplace of ideas. Platforms for participation create a global stage where large communities of partners create value, and harness the power of human capital across borders and across organizational boundaries to increase innovation and improve morale by cutting across organizational hierarchies.
This is a new way of organizing effort and a new method of competing.
The Chinese motorcycle industry, the biggest in the world, has hundreds of little companies making parts, There is no OEM or big company like Harley-Davidson pulling all the strings. Instead, people can collaborate across the silos of power and production in ways that contravene traditional hierarchies.
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