Saturday, August 23, 2008

Backing the Underdog

Well, in addition to our website, we started offering our items two months ago on GoAntiques. This week, however, we received an email announcing that GoAntiques has been sold to something called the WorthPoint Corporation. Sounds disturbingly similar to the Hanso Foundation from the TV series Lost, which I freely admit I am addicted to. Not a very descriptive name, but as long as we don’t have to try and sell jewelry on an island in an alternative reality, it is cool, I guess.

I did not think it would affect us much, until we got another email yesterday, announcing that they were going to start their own auction platform to go up against eBay. That IS pretty exciting. I have been a long time eBay user – sold my first item there in 1997. I have watched eBay go from a revolutionary buying and selling venue, to well, whatever it is today. eBay has managed to systematically obliterate what was once a true global selling community. As a seller, I stopped using eBay as a viable sales site a long time ago, going from Gold Powerseller status listing over 100 items a week to occasionally throwing a listing or two up as an advertising method to drive traffic to our site. Why? eBay slowly but surely destroyed what made them so wildly successful in the first place. They lost track of their roots and refused to listen to the opinions of their users – buyers and sellers both. Their customer service is non-existent. They decimated the feedback system by not allowing sellers to leave negative feedback for deadbeat buyers. They manipulated fees – at one point announcing they were lowering fees when in reality they were raising them on the back end which was an insult to the intelligence of sellers all over the world. As both a seller and a shareholder, I have had it with eBay. From what I have read online, it doesn’t matter anyway, as eBay has a “secret” plan to change their format anyway, at least according to this writer.

Over the years, I have watched many other auction sites try and fail to take on the monolith that is eBay, so I am trying not to get too excited. But I truly believe that eBay this time has alienated enough of their sellers that GoAntiques and WorthPoint have a shot. I wish them well and will try and support them in their effort. I hope you will, too!

Enough of my rant, here is some pretty jewelry from our latest site update to look at and if you are in the Baltimore area next week, come visit my partner Beverly (Clayton Antiques) at the Baltimore Antique Show!