Personal reverse auctions

One of the innovations I'm really looking forward to from a personal standpoint is the ability to do personal reverse auction on the Net. I think they'd really be handy when it comes to picking up bargains after deflation has ravaged the country for another few months.

In case you're not familiar with reverse auctions, it's where you place a bid for something and let sellers find you, instead of sellers posting an item for sale and you placing a bid with them.

Seems simple, right? It should be, but we don't have the infrastructure for it. In order for this to be a universally useful function it needs to be baked into the Web stack. Right now, it's not. The method for publishing your wishlist doesn't exist yet, and then there's the little issue of how people will discover your wishlist–Google won't cut it.

RDF and linked data provide a perfectly wonderful way to discover these reverse auctions eventually, but that's only part of the equation.

For example (and this was the trigger for this post), I am sick of dealing with TypePad and Six Apart. Even though I pay them $15 a month, I can't just leave my blog up and expect it to work, for some reason they insist on actively breaking things. I'd love to find somebody handy with WordPress who could take my TypePad blog and convert it to WordPress for a reasonable price. I could do it, but the time it would take to learn the innards of WordPress would be a losing value proposition for me.

Right now if I want to find that person I have to go post at a site like Guru.com, or post here on my blog and hope somebody finds it. That's inefficient. This problem needs to be solved.

By the way, if you're a WordPress guru or you know somebody who is, leave a comment or drop me a line.

(This post is a poor man's reverse auction

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Filed Under: Ideas

Lowery

The most sophisticated electronic economy that I can think of at present exists within the game called Eve: Online. The game itself (in my opinion) is immensely boring. However, it's market system is rather beautiful.

A seller can create a contract to sell X items for a fixed price.

A buyer can create a similar contract to buy products.

It is not necessary to fill the entire order or purchase the entire order. The size of the lot is determined by the person picking up the contract. Say the seller is offering 12 spaceships at 1mil each, you can buy just 1. Conversely a buyer may be looking to acquire say 140,000 shuttles, but you only have 3–you can sell just the 3.

Additionally, there are auction bid contracts (both forward and reverse iirc).

The game, by the way, was made in England. The design concept, properly adapted to real life, would be a most excellent way to shop and sell online.
http://profile.typepad.com/jasonkolb jasonkolb

Heh, that's crazy. I can't believe people enjoy spending their time doing that. It's a big enough pain to do for real

Although it is interesting that they've gotten that sophisticated in a game already…
Lowery

Well, it's much easier to implement in a game than IRL because there exists a single catalog of items that can be sold. Doing the same thing with real life goods isn't really plausible. For instance, just think for a second about a buy contract for 800 green wool sweaters… I could get 3 lime green cable knits, 4 cashmere vests, and an assortment of green argyles. The problem exists in specificity.

The same problem occurs on a Public Reverse Auction which works great in a game because you know exactly what the item is and they're all the same (I want to buy 300 items of SKU# 14181 for instance).

A consumer looking for a Green Sweater might be overwhelmed by bids for all sorts of green sweaters most of which are nothing like the one he wants, some of them might be listed as "Broken Item! For Parts or Repair Only!" and even some people trying to sell him CDs containing lists of various manufacturers of green sweaters.

As with all things Game, a Game world is a "perfect" situation. One can take hints from their interface and DB structure, but you still have to conquer the real life logistics on your own.
Lowery

… and you KNOW that there'll be scanbots dropping form letters on everyone:

Happy Love Greetings For You from SinoCorp!

We have good GREEN SWEATER for your happy feelings! Please visit http://www.scamforyou.com.

and when you get there all they're selling is unwanted female babies… some of whom may come with a free green sweater.
DE

I guess Eve is a very good example of a full economy, including reverse auctions. One advantage it has is being a single shard.

Jason, surely what you describe is a service and does not have to be baked into the web. Infrastructure plays have been done poorly by companies without teh resources, but thats where the effort should come from.

As for finding help, many people do that via Twitter – a service you thought would be bust by now
http://profile.typepad.com/jasonkolb jasonkolb

DE,

I like Twitter. It's a fun toy. I use it. I think the concept has great potential for business communication.

But Twitter itself is a VC phenomenon. As a standalone business they're going to be a terrible investment, unless they really have some brilliant strategy that I can't conceive of.

There are plenty of clones out there now, all they are is a brand. Somebody will buy them for cheap, for the brand and integrate it as a feature into a larger product.
DE

As I ave already commented on a post here http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/ that there are already too many conversations about Twitter, I won't make it worse.
http://www.oltiby.com Reverse Auctions

i have found a reverse auction site where you can post your wishlist for free: http://www.oltiby.com

It is working quite well, hope you'll enjoy it
http://www.biduhappy.com johnboy

Check out http://www.biduhappy.com – its currently a more goods orientated reverse auction but its going to spread out in the new year and also offer the optoin of "publishing" your wish list with widgets to interact with, sigh, you guessed it . . . twitter.