posted on July 27, 2000 09:31:16 PM new
VeryModern said, "Now I think she said this collectable market has flattened out which makes sense to me, and reflects my personal experience as well as what we read on these boards. So they head off in a new direction..."
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She may have meant that the collectibles market had flattened out, but that is not what she stated. Meg Whitman said that the core collectibles, that which had given birth to eBay, was *smaller* nowadays, in that there were SO many other categories which did not exist originally. Now I don't mean to be picky about this, but in all accuracy, I don't believe she stated or inferred that core collectibles had "flattened."
Ya know, books were one of the very first things to be successfully sold online. Although I did not come online to do business, but for a very different reason altogether, I did immediately conduct long extensive searches on all online booksites and booksearch engines.
I'm sure that well before I surfed on over to the 100th online bookstore, that I was already saying to myself, well~well~well, and how important is it to me, how renumerative in FACT, to develop a website, list inventory .... when I KNOW that within a few years there will be 1000s of online bookstores???????? And, frankly none of the online aggregators of books, like alibris or abebooks - not one of them had anything remotely "magnetic" about it, strictly ho-hum.
Some time in 1997 I discovered eBay's AuctionWeb, and frankly, my initial reaction was identical to Whitman's with the important caveat, an exception: I realized with development, that this could be an easy MANAGEABLE way to conduct small business online.
So, among the 100s of bibliophiles and booksellers I was meeting online, I sent several dozen over to check out eBay, and I waited, as something simply didn't feel right.
Finally, by the time when I had visited eBay THREE times in a row, and it was up and working good, I decided to finally try it out.
However, you see, from the very BEGINNING, from the VERY first booksearch engine I ever examined, I knew that problems were ahead, in the immediate future, as soon, EVERY book in every attic in America would be listed for sale online.
While many others have found this view very werry negative, I simply found it to be a foregone conclusion.
Now in reference to the hallmark items -- are you familiar with the Levi blue jeans factory which decided to eliminate middlemen and retail stores and sell direct to the customer on the Net?
They shut down their website quite some time ago, in favor of the 3-D merchandising chain. TCNs and chargebacks and semitruckloads of jeans looked real good after their experience, lol.
posted on July 30, 2000 05:00:30 PM new
VeryModern: There has been a complete paradigm shift. I'll leave it to the experts to discover and write about it at a future time.
In the same way that I was floored to have finally realized that individuals exist who still believe in the passe power of olde fashioned archaic misogyny to impact you 0R me, there are a whole buncha things that will also be seen to be as powerless and consigned to the dustbin of history as hopelessly quaint.
The fact remains that Meg Whitman pulled a Guderian with all of the cunning of a Rommel, and just because no one noticed, does not mean tiddlelee-winks.
posted on September 13, 2000 02:27:19 PM newJULY 30, 2000
QUOTE:
"The fact remains that Meg Whitman pulled a Guderian with all of the cunning of a Rommel, and just because no one noticed, does not mean tiddlelee-winks."
