Get List'd

Here’s some interesting news. It looks like eBay is selling out to Tom.com – PayPal at the least. Read more:

Auctionbytes and here

TechCrunch

Shanghai Daily

Blogging Stocks

Looks to be an interesting road ahead for us third-party developers!

I’ve really gotten interested in the some of the eBay buyers tools that are on the market. I’ve just run through Gumshoo, a tool for buyers to find deals on eBay. The team behind it has done a great job putting together a number of tools and widgets that make your life easier.

One of the items that I really liked was the Gumshoo widget that you can add to your blog/website (as I have done) that allows you to easily search eBay using the Gumshoo tool. It’s a cool marketing tool that is actually fun and useful.

Once you search for a deal on Gumshoo, you are taken through their own interface of eBay (see screenshot below). It’s very user-friendly, and helps you navigate the site easily. The tab at the top lets you search by “mispellings” as well.

We’re happy to let everyone know about a new eBay seller’s tool that has been launched called List’d Express (www.listd.com)! List’d is an easy and fast way to put your items on eBay, best of all it’s free. That means free image hosting, free scheduled-listings and free templates.

The idea for List’d came about because we realized that there were a number of tools available for “powersellers”, but there weren’t many options for people who want to list an item on eBay randomly, or a few times per month. The few tools that were out there were clunky, had a cost associated with them, or weren’t user-friendly.

We set out to create the easiest and most user-friendly eBay sellers tool on the market. A one-page listing tool that would help you get an item up in just minutes. No more going through the 5 pages on eBay to list something. We wanted a tool that anyone could use.

Some of the neat things that we’ve done to make List’d an easy tool to use:

• Keywords to find your category – Many people don’t know what category they should list their item in. We have set up a way for users to type in up to 6 keywords and List’d will return the most probable categories for you.
• Beautiful templates – We’re starting off with three great templates. We realized that there was a lack of great looking templates, so the team has put together a couple that will knock your socks off.
• Scheduled listings – Choose to end your auction in 7 days, or have it end on the next Sunday evening at 8:00 PM (generally the best time to end an auction on eBay).
• List similar items – Once you have finished listing your item, you can easily relist another one with all the fields pre-polulated for you.

A screenshot of the listing page with a sample listing:

Some template examples: So, everyone do us a favor and try it out (You need an eBay sellers account to use it). Whether you like it or not, we would love to get your feedback. What can be made better, what do you love about it? You can email me directly at erik@getlistd.com or leave a comment here or the Get List’d blog. We are still very much in our early stages of development, and your feedback is critical for us to fine tune List’d.

eBay is set to launch it’s new ad program, eBay AdContext, that allows those who own affiliate websites to make 40 -70% off of the items that are sold via the link on the affiliate website. Reuters reports that:

The eBay Developers’ Conference is showcasing how eBay is changing from a one-stop shopping center, where everything happens on the eBay site, to a supplier of auction, payment and communications technologies that can be used on any Web site.

This move to allow small website owners to make additional revenues off of ads for eBay should do very well. After all, many of the sellers on eBay have their own stores, websites, or blogs that they could run these ads on. Who knows, maybe we’ll even run some on this blog to test them out.

Also mentioned is the opening up of the eBay feedback system to outside developers (like us). I would be interested to see what companies like Rapleaf would do if the feedback system was able to be tapped into by them.

If eBay is truly trying to open up their platform and make it a disembodied web, branded by eBay owned technologies like Skype and Paypal, then it would make sense to open the feedback area up as well. We shall see.

TechCrunch has released a news item about eBay and Kaboodle collaborating on a bookmarking service for eBay users called MyCollectibles. You can find it on eBay at ebay.com/mycollectibles.

eBay users who purchase and sell items in the collectibles category will be able to showcase products they’ve purchased on ebay or elsewhere, tag them and allow comments (all standard Kaboodle functionality). The site already allows users to auto-import items they’ve purchased on eBay. in the future they’ll be able to list items within MyCollectibles for sale on eBay with a couple of clicks.

This is a welcome and useful tool for eBay users, and will be unveiled in its full glory at eBay Live this coming week.

It’s interesting to watch eBay move into the Web 2.0 space through greater community building mechanisms like Kaboodle and their recent announcement of blogs (which is something to comment on at a later date). The good thing is watching them embrace the change, even though they could possibly execute on it better.