8 Mar
2004
8 Mar
'04
4:27 a.m.
I just read some statistics about the change in direction that Ebay
is taking. From AuctionBytes-Update Number 114 - March 7, 2004 -
ISSN 1528-6703:
"Collectibles comprised 60 percent of the total value of goods sold on
eBay in 1999. In 2003, collectibles comprised just 13 percent of gross
merchandise sales.
Each year, selling on eBay becomes more challenging. If you have a
rare and unique item, you'll get a very good price on eBay. Otherwise,
in many categories, competition is tough."
8 Mar
8 Mar
4:43 a.m.
In 2003, collectibles comprised just 13 percent of
gross merchandise
sales.
Sounds like just the by-product of trying to up their volume. When
they got all the collectible market, or 90% of it at least, they went
grabbing for the target* market.
John A.
*target and walmart and kmart and...
4:47 a.m.
Hmmmm, thats interesting... I wonder if that's why sites like
marketplace.vintage.org specifically for vintage computers and
www.bidiots.com for videogames have appeared on the scene and as time
has gone by their usage is slowly and steadily increasing.
Perhaps ebay's "does it all" model is finally weighing too heavy on them
and its sites like VCM, Bidiots and I assume there must be others with
their niche-angle are in a very good position to give consumers looking
for a specific genre of items to have a specific shopping place for such
things.
I know I've read people say "I'm not going to use more then 1 site for
shopping..." but quite honestly Ebay's searching system is not perfect
and I know there have been many times I've missed out on something I
wanted or could've used... I think knowing that if I go to VCM to
search for DEC related items I will find nothing but those when I do a
search instead of also getting results that are just DEC and Qbus cards
I'll see Deck Repair Kits, Deck of Cards, Route Q Bus maps and other
nonsense.
Same applies for when I search for videogames, when I go to look up
Atari Jaguar items I don't want to pull up Jaguar XJ6 engine parts,
Jaguar Jungle photo's and other nonsense that has nothing to do with
videogame related items, so I would much rather go to a site that caters
specifically to a category of items I am looking for.
I've tried bidville and yahoo auctions and they are too generalized and
just don't seem to have whats needed to go toe to toe with EBay, but I
think these niche sites are what are going to make a major dent in EBay
and will be successful models for buying/selling in the future.
Curt
Marvin Johnston wrote:
I just read some statistics about the change in
direction that Ebay
is taking. From AuctionBytes-Update Number 114 - March 7, 2004 -
ISSN 1528-6703:
"Collectibles comprised 60 percent of the total value of goods sold on
eBay in 1999. In 2003, collectibles comprised just 13 percent of gross
merchandise sales.
Each year, selling on eBay becomes more challenging. If you have a
rare and unique item, you'll get a very good price on eBay. Otherwise,
in many categories, competition is tough."
--
Curt Vendel & Karl Morris
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Atari Museum
http://www.atarimuseum.com
The Atari Explorer
http://www.atari-explorer.com
5:32 a.m.
--- Curt Vendel <curt(a)atarimuseum.com> wrote:
.
Same applies for when I search for videogames, when
I go to look up
Atari Jaguar items I don't want to pull up Jaguar
XJ6 engine parts,
Jaguar Jungle photo's and other nonsense that has
nothing to do with
videogame related items, so I would much rather go
to a site that caters
specifically to a category of items I am looking
for.
Isn't that what the ebay categories are for? I would
think if you perform catagory specific searches you
wouldn't have all these problems.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com
5:48 a.m.
You'd be surprised, plus the fact that Ebay just trashed all their
categories (AGAIN!) and now they've got everything so generalized... I
used to have all the categories I posted and read down and now Ebay
eliminated all of them and put everything under a bunch of umbrella
categories...
Curt
steve wrote:
--- Curt Vendel <curt(a)atarimuseum.com> wrote:
.
--
Curt Vendel & Karl Morris
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Atari Museum
http://www.atarimuseum.com
The Atari Explorer
http://www.atari-explorer.com
Same applies for when I search for videogames,
when
I go to look up
Atari Jaguar items I don't want to pull up Jaguar
XJ6 engine parts,
Jaguar Jungle photo's and other nonsense that has
nothing to do with
videogame related items, so I would much rather go
to a site that caters
specifically to a category of items I am looking
for.
Isn't that what the ebay categories are for? I would
think if you perform catagory specific searches you
wouldn't have all these problems.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you?re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com
12:22 p.m.
You'd be surprised, plus the fact that Ebay just
trashed all their
categories (AGAIN!) and now they've got everything so generalized... I
used to have all the categories I posted and read down and now Ebay
eliminated all of them and put everything under a bunch of umbrella
categories...
I just checked Ebay minutes ago, and all of the categories I use are
still very intact, with the same numbers. How are you seeing this "trashing"?
As a side note - did anyone notice for a day or so, auction titles grew
about 40 percent? Usually I try to cram as many meaningful words in the
title, stopping when I hit the wall. Well, the wall was out further for a
short time, allowing 20 or so additional characters in the title. More
words for the search engine, as far as I was concerned.
I think it may have been an experiment. It seems that the Subtitle option
is not very popular, so they may be trying to remedy it.
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org
8:43 a.m.
The Ebay search engine is a bad joke. One of the searches I used to use
was:
(s-100,altair,imsai) -canon -samsung -minolta
They hyphen is not recognized, and instead of bringing up the stuff I am
interested in, 521 items get brought up including junk like "70`S AND
80`S AND 90`S 100 baseball and football cards".
Your way of searching will totally exclude items that got posted in the
wrong catagory and other such items.
steve wrote:
--- Curt Vendel <curt(a)atarimuseum.com> wrote:
.
Same applies for when I search for videogames, when
I go to look up
Atari Jaguar items I don't want to pull up Jaguar
XJ6 engine parts,
Jaguar Jungle photo's and other nonsense that has
nothing to do with
videogame related items, so I would much rather go
to a site that caters
specifically to a category of items I am looking
for.
Isn't that what the ebay categories are for? I would
think if you perform catagory specific searches you
wouldn't have all these problems. 
9:13 a.m.
The BIG problem with searching on E-bay is the keyword SPAMMERs. A lot
of the junk sellers include a lot words for popular items in their text so
that eveytime you search for something like "hewlett packard" it finds
their listing for something like "How I got rich on E-bay" CD. The keywords
are frequently embedded as white characters on a white background or
something similar so that you don't even see them when you view the
listing. I've complained to E-bay about this practice but they don't care.
Joe
At 11:43 AM 3/8/04 -0800, you wrote:
The Ebay search engine is a bad joke. One of the searches I used to use
was:
(s-100,altair,imsai) -canon -samsung -minolta
They hyphen is not recognized, and instead of bringing up the stuff I am
interested in, 521 items get brought up including junk like "70`S AND
80`S AND 90`S 100 baseball and football cards".
I think the - in S-100 may confuse the search engine. You probably need
to enclose s-100 in quotes ( "S-100" ).
Joe
Your way of searching will totally exclude items that got posted in the
wrong catagory and other such items.
steve wrote:
--- Curt Vendel <curt(a)atarimuseum.com> wrote:
.
Same applies for when I search for videogames, when
I go to look up
Atari Jaguar items I don't want to pull up Jaguar
XJ6 engine parts,
Jaguar Jungle photo's and other nonsense that has
nothing to do with
videogame related items, so I would much rather go
to a site that caters
specifically to a category of items I am looking
for.
Isn't that what the ebay categories are for? I would
think if you perform catagory specific searches you
wouldn't have all these problems.
10:29 a.m.
Keyword spamming is only a problems when you do description searches;
they won't affect title searches.
"Joe R." wrote:
The BIG problem with searching on E-bay is the keyword SPAMMERs. A lot
of the junk sellers include a lot words for popular items in their text so
that eveytime you search for something like "hewlett packard" it finds
their listing for something like "How I got rich on E-bay" CD. The keywords
are frequently embedded as white characters on a white background or
something similar so that you don't even see them when you view the
listing. I've complained to E-bay about this practice but they don't care.
Joe
At 11:43 AM 3/8/04 -0800, you wrote:
The Ebay search engine is a bad joke. One of the searches I used to use
was:
(s-100,altair,imsai) -canon -samsung -minolta
They hyphen is not recognized, and instead of bringing up the stuff I am
interested in, 521 items get brought up including junk like "70`S AND
80`S AND 90`S 100 baseball and football cards".
I think the - in S-100 may confuse the search engine. You probably need
to enclose s-100 in quotes ( "S-100" ).
Joe
>
>Your way of searching will totally exclude items that got posted in the
>wrong catagory and other such items.
>
>steve wrote:
>>
>> --- Curt Vendel <curt(a)atarimuseum.com> wrote:
>> .
>> >
>> > Same applies for when I search for videogames, when
>> > I go to look up
>> > Atari Jaguar items I don't want to pull up Jaguar
>> > XJ6 engine parts,
>> > Jaguar Jungle photo's and other nonsense that has
>> > nothing to do with
>> > videogame related items, so I would much rather go
>> > to a site that caters
>> > specifically to a category of items I am looking
>> > for.
>>
>> Isn't that what the ebay categories are for? I would
>> think if you perform catagory specific searches you
>> wouldn't have all these problems.
>
10:39 a.m.
True but I do a lot of description searches. People write mis-leading
titles just like they put stuff in the wrong catagory.
Joe
At 01:29 PM 3/8/04 -0800, you wrote:
Keyword spamming is only a problems when you do description searches;
they won't affect title searches.
"Joe R." wrote:
The BIG problem with searching on E-bay is the keyword SPAMMERs. A lot
of the junk sellers include a lot words for popular items in their text so
that eveytime you search for something like "hewlett packard" it finds
their listing for something like "How I got rich on E-bay" CD. The keywords
are frequently embedded as white characters on a white background or
something similar so that you don't even see them when you view the
listing. I've complained to E-bay about this practice but they don't care.
Joe
At 11:43 AM 3/8/04 -0800, you wrote:
The Ebay search engine is a bad joke. One of the searches I used to use
was:
(s-100,altair,imsai) -canon -samsung -minolta
They hyphen is not recognized, and instead of bringing up the stuff I am
interested in, 521 items get brought up including junk like "70`S AND
80`S AND 90`S 100 baseball and football cards".
I think the - in S-100 may confuse the search engine. You probably need
to enclose s-100 in quotes ( "S-100" ).
Joe
>
>Your way of searching will totally exclude items that got posted in the
>wrong catagory and other such items.
>
>steve wrote:
>>
>> --- Curt Vendel <curt(a)atarimuseum.com> wrote:
>> .
>> >
>> > Same applies for when I search for videogames, when
>> > I go to look up
>> > Atari Jaguar items I don't want to pull up Jaguar
>> > XJ6 engine parts,
>> > Jaguar Jungle photo's and other nonsense that has
>> > nothing to do with
>> > videogame related items, so I would much rather go
>> > to a site that caters
>> > specifically to a category of items I am looking
>> > for.
>>
>> Isn't that what the ebay categories are for? I would
>> think if you perform catagory specific searches you
>> wouldn't have all these problems.
> 
9:23 a.m.
On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Marvin Johnston wrote:
The Ebay search engine is a bad joke. One of the searches I used to use
was:
(s-100,altair,imsai) -canon -samsung -minolta
They hyphen is not recognized, and instead of bringing up the stuff I am
interested in, 521 items get brought up including junk like "70`S AND
80`S AND 90`S 100 baseball and football cards".
You need to quote anything you're using as a literal:
("s-100",altair,imsai)
g.
9:30 a.m.
> (s-100,altair,imsai) -canon -samsung -minolta
> They hyphen is not recognized, and instead of bringing up the stuff I am
On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Gene Buckle wrote:
You need to quote anything you're using as a
literal:
("s-100",altair,imsai)
even quotes won't force recognition of a hyphen in eBay.
Evwen with quotes, it will see ". . . S 100 . . ." as matching
"S-100"
10:28 a.m.
You might get better luck than I am using quotes as they do absolutely
nothing when I insert the quotes. Been there and have the scars to prove
it :). A check just a minute ago showed 522 items with or without the
quotes. As I said, the Ebay search engine is a bad joke.
Gene Buckle wrote:
On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Marvin Johnston wrote:
The Ebay search engine is a bad joke. One of the searches I used to use
was:
(s-100,altair,imsai) -canon -samsung -minolta
They hyphen is not recognized, and instead of bringing up the stuff I am
interested in, 521 items get brought up including junk like "70`S AND
80`S AND 90`S 100 baseball and football cards".
You need to quote anything you're using as a literal:
("s-100",altair,imsai)
g.
12:31 p.m.
The Ebay search engine is a bad joke. One of the
searches I used to use
was:
(s-100,altair,imsai) -canon -samsung -minolta
Now, generally I don't have too many complaints against Ebay. I think it
works fairly well*. However, I must agree with their search engine. It
sucks. After finely tuning my searches (a hard thing to do, by the way,
as the keyword spammers are a problem) and getting things working well,
one day everything stopped working the way I wanted it to. In some case
the searches could not find anything, while others overloaded the engine.
I changed nothing. Nothing for months. I complained, and being an evil
Powerseller, I would get fairly quick, personal responses from the tech
support folks. They insisted that nothing changed on their end. They even
gave me a few examples to work with - and they did not even work the way
they should! So now, after fine tuning everything all over again, I still
have to wade thru tons of crap to see what I want to see. This may be one
of the reasons why I don't bid much anymore.
* Note to the flamers - I will NOT respond to anything. Don't bother.
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org
9 Mar
9 Mar
8:21 a.m.
--- Marvin Johnston <marvin(a)rain.org> wrote:
The Ebay search engine is a bad joke. One of the
searches I used to use
was:
(s-100,altair,imsai) -canon -samsung -minolta
They hyphen is not recognized, and instead of
bringing up the stuff I am
interested in, 521 items get brought up including
junk like "70`S AND
80`S AND 90`S 100 baseball and football cards".
Your way of searching will totally exclude items
that got posted in the
wrong catagory and other such items.
Yes, but what you basically doing is equivalent to
looking at every single table in a gigantic flea
market, regardless whether the vendor is selling tee
shirts or electronics, and hoping that the tee shirt
guy has an Altair underneath his table. Fine, this is
a wonderful way of getting bargains, but your going to
have to pay the price another way, by spending hours
wading through tons of crap, this is no different on
ebay. You can tell Ebay to put any filters you want
in their search engine, but sellers are always going
to find new ways to trick you into finding their
auctions.
Maybe a compromise is to search a couple high level
categories, like computers,Business & Industrial,
consumer electronics and skip over the Sports and
Stamps and the like. This will save you some time and
not limit your search too much.
steve
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com
1:31 a.m.
On Tue, 9 Mar 2004, steve wrote:
Maybe a compromise is to search a couple high level
categories, like
computers,Business & Industrial, consumer electronics and skip over the
Sports and Stamps and the like. This will save you some time and not
limit your search too much.
I think the better compromise is to move your business over to a service
that is responsive to its user's needs, like, for instance, the Vintage
Computer Marketplace ;)
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]
1:35 p.m.
steve wrote:
--- Marvin Johnston <marvin(a)rain.org> wrote:
>
> The Ebay search engine is a bad joke. One of the
> searches I used to use
Your way of
searching will totally exclude items
that got posted in the
wrong catagory and other such items.
Yes, but what you basically doing is equivalent to
looking at every single table in a gigantic flea
market, regardless whether the vendor is selling tee ebay. You can tell Ebay to put any filters you want
in their search engine, but sellers are always going
to find new ways to trick you into finding their
auctions.
I don't want Ebay to do anything more than provide a decent search
engine. It is not up to *anyone* to tell me how or what to search for
(no offense meant to anyone.) I am more than competent to decide for
myself what I want to search for.
8 Mar
8 Mar
6:27 a.m.
In message <404C95AD.5080408(a)atarimuseum.com>
Curt Vendel <curt(a)atarimuseum.com> wrote:
Hmmmm, thats interesting... I wonder if that's
why sites like
marketplace.vintage.org specifically for vintage computers and
www.bidiots.com for videogames have appeared on the scene and as time
has gone by their usage is slowly and steadily increasing.
To be honest, I rarely
bother with Ebay. OTOH, Ebay does have its uses - I
bought a USB to RS232 converter cable off Ebay for ?13 (about $20) that was
listed in various computer component catalogues for upwards of ?30 (about
$50).
I've been thinking about getting one of those nice little VT520 amberscreen
DEC terminals that have been popping up on VCM. Only problem is, I bet
they're incredibly heavy and thus very expensive to send transatlantic. That
and I doubt the power supply would appreciate getting over twice the rated
voltage pushed into the input - natch.
Later.
--
Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB,
philpem(a)dsl.pipex.com | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice,
http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI
... When I get a better mouse trap built, mice will be an endangered species.
12 Mar
12 Mar
4:30 a.m.
On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Philip Pemberton wrote:
I've been thinking about getting one of those nice
little VT520 amberscreen
DEC terminals that have been popping up on VCM. Only problem is, I bet
they're incredibly heavy and thus very expensive to send transatlantic. That
and I doubt the power supply would appreciate getting over twice the rated
voltage pushed into the input - natch.
Hi Philip.
As I mentioned to you in private e-mail, the DEC VT-520 is not terribly
heavy--24lbs. Still, it would cost US$56 to ship to the UK. All other
options (Fedex, DHL) are unfathomably expensive.
The VT520 power supply is universal: it can accept 110-240 (no switching
required; internal regulation).
My problem now is I've run out of keyboards. I got in about 20 of these
terminals but only 7 LK461 keyboards. These have PS/2 style connectors.
I can plug a standard PC keyboard into them and the basic keys seem to
work, but the function key mapping is different, as when I press F3, which
should take me into the Setup screens with an LK461 keyboard, has no
effect with a PC keyboard.
Has anyone got a bunch of LK461 or equivalent keyboards for sale or trade?
I have a bunch of LK201 keyboards I can spare. Alas, these won't work
with the VT520 (RJ22 telephone handset style jack).
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]
6:30 a.m.
On Fri, 12 Mar 2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
As I mentioned to you in private e-mail, the DEC
VT-520 is not terribly
heavy--24lbs. Still, it would cost US$56 to ship to the UK. All other
options (Fedex, DHL) are unfathomably expensive.
Edification: US$56 via US Postal Service.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]
7438
days inactive
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19 comments
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participants (10)
-
allain＠panix.com -
aw288＠osfn.org -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
curt＠atarimuseum.com -
geneb＠deltasoft.com -
gkicomputers＠yahoo.com -
marvin＠rain.org -
philpem＠dsl.pipex.com -
rigdonj＠cfl.rr.com -
vcf＠siconic.com