Ebay Issues: A Modest Proposal

I'd like to take a step back from the gruesome details of eBaiting sellers & shill bidders, and talk about The Big Picture.

The real problem here is that no buyer knows what to pay.

If you know what to pay, life is easy: you set your bid; you win, you lose; either way, you're done.

But buyers almost never know what to pay.

Nothing stops any IRL auction from using shill bidders, especially when the item belongs to the house. Just as on ebay, there is little/no cost to 'awarding' an item to their own winning bid and 'canceling' delivery.

Nothing stops any online dealer from holding an 'auction' which is little more than a price list in which the buyers get to compete against each other.

Dealers at shows & in storefronts have it a little harder, but they can still show something they know little about, wait for someone to express an interest, and say "I need to show that to someone else before I can sell it to you, but you can look at it" as a way of testing the price waters. Can't do that too often, but it can be done now & again.

What buyers need is a credible resource that lists items & prices. We could call it a 'catalog'. This would serve as a benchmark, against which buyers & sellers could argue why any individual item should be priced higher of lower.

Such a 'catalog' would go a long way towards establishing & maintaining an orderly market.

Q/ Perhaps one of the big album publishers could take this on?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Ikey,
Modest proposal? Sounds like a major undertaking to me.

First we would need to standard on how the information was stored. While it might seem fairly easy this is actually quite a task. We will want to be able to harvest data from all kinds of disparate sources. These sources may use differing formats for currency, nomenclature, and even languages. So a standard format has to be defined and everyone has to use it. No small task and one that needs to be fully supported at all levels in philately.

Frankly I have 'been here and done this' and it fell on its face due to a lack of interest as a grassroots effort. The use of meta-data and XML format is ideally suited for something like this and would not be ground breaking other than getting everyone on the same page. But after trying to get buy in for about 8 months I finally gave up. This effort included contacting some of the biggest 'players' in the philately.

I was criticized on many levels for this idea, including being told that I was not able to successfully communicate the idea and solution. From my chair it felt more like 'push back' for something new and resistant to change but who knows. I had spent hours and hours building the SQL database backend and putting a web site interface in it only to have people be critical without spending more than 2 minutes in the site (I guess they didn't understand that I could see the log files on their visits).

So if anyone want to revisit this idea, and is willing to actually commit to doing it; let me know. But it is my opinion that unless you can get someone with very deep pockets (investor) and/or influence (i.e. APS) this is a nonstarter as a grassroots effort.