Auction Business Frank Ross on 28 Oct 2006 02:54 am
Followup On UBid
It’s now been a few weeks since I posted a piece about UBid (Link Here). Since that time, I’ve had the chance to actually try selling on the site and for the most part am a bit disappointed. My disappointment stems from what I consider to be 2 rather serious shortcomings:
Buyers Don’t Know the Seller
The seller’s identity is hidden from the prospective buyer. From the buyer / bidder / shopper perspective, they are purchasing from UBid itself. UBid handles the payment and bears the risk of the transaction, so in their business model, the seller’s identity is insulated from the buyer. The buyer can contact the seller anonymously, but that’s all. It isn’t until after the purchase has been made, that the buyer will know anything about the actual seller. Compare this to eBay, where the seller’s feedback hangs out for everyone to see. I see this is as a problem for any business who desires to build a brand. This flies in the face of brand building for the seller; the seller is essentially helping to build UBid’s brand.
Missing Features
UBid has been around since at least 2000 and it surprised me to see that some very basic features are missing. One example is calculated shipping. All UBid offers is flat rate - you’re supposed to choose an average catch-all flat rate for your product. Everyone has real time shipping calculators nowadays and there is little excuse for UBid not having one. Another example are the date fields. When setting up a listing, you must type out the dates (starting date, ending date, and so on). There is no calendar applet. I know from my experience as a programmer in a past life, that a calendar applet is one of the easier things to whip up and I see no excuse for this omission either.
There are good points about UBid. As I mentioned, they take care of the fraud problem. Also, your listings are automatically fed to other sales channels like Froogle - that’s kind of a nice feature. But overall, I don’t see UBid as serious contenders to eBay. Still I did manage to sell one item, so my testing (and blogging about it) is not yet complete.