on-line retail, bidding, auction
SOURCE: CNET NEWS.com
Start-up targets eBay deadbeats
Published: August 26, 2004, 8:41 AM PDT
By Matt Hines
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
In the world of online auctioneers, deadbeat bidders are the bane of business.
Anyone who has marketed more than a handful of items on eBay or other auction sites has likely run into the type. This is the person who bids twice what you expected to garner for your used CD collection, only to admit after winning that he or she never had enough dough to pay for it.
Since its earliest days, eBay has warned its users to beware of deadbeat bidders but has largely left the process of weeding out troublemakers to the community-oriented environment for which the company is known. eBay relies almost completely on its users looking at feedback-rating pages, where people offer praise or criticism of their fellow eBay members, and judging for themselves who the real buyers and sellers are versus the unsavory pretenders.
Despite the success of eBay and its feedback system, at least one company believes the unscrupulous-bidding trend is a big enough problem to fuel a full-time business. DeadBeater, a 6-month-old start-up, is offering a subscription-based service that augments eBay's user-rating system.
"As eBay has grown, the need for this sort of service has grown with it," said Bob Susskind, managing director and co-founder of DeadBeater. "(eBay) is founded on the idea that a user's bid is essentially a contract, but they're not enforcing that rule."
DeadBeater's service, which costs $5.95 per month, is aimed at eBay's many high-volume traders--people attempting to run a business over the site. The online system analyzes the user feedback available through eBay, gathers more detailed information on the people bidding on items, and can even block buyers who have spotty track records. The company declined to say how it gathers additional information.
"If you're trying to run 30 auctions at the same time, it's hard to do this sort of work, weeding out the problem bidders manually," Susskind said. "We're going to help people running businesses on eBay save time and increase their profits."
In addition to assigning a rating to each eBay member, DeadBeater, which is based in Incline Village, Nev., also provides an online forum for subscribers to share information about troublesome customers.
The company's service can be set up to automatically e-mail a subscriber when a bid has been placed on an item he is selling by a user with a low rating. The service can also inform a potential buyer with a less-than-stellar bidding history to contact a product's seller before being allowed to place a bid....
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