Participation Literacy

About text:

eBay is the world’s online marketplace - a place for buyers and sellers to come together and trade almost anything!

Here’s how it works:

* A seller lists an item on eBay - from antiques to cars, books to sporting goods. The seller chooses to accept only bids for the item (an online auction) or to offer the Buy It Now option, which allows buyers to purchase the item right away.

* In an online auction, the bidding opens at a price the seller specifies and remains on eBay for a certain number of days. Buyers then place bids on the item. When the listing ends, the buyer with the highest bid wins!

* In fixed price listings that offer Buy It Now, the first buyer willing to pay the seller’s price gets the item.

Ebay is a shopping community with 180 000 000 (Seattle Times January 29, 2006) users, which might be compared to a super gigantic mall the size of central Europe. In this mall you can buy everything between heaven and earth, both new things and second hand. You can buy things directly or by bidding, making Ebay an antique shop, an auction house, and a mall; all in one package. The sellers are private persons, selling something like their old TV, or a store with thousands of products. All sellers have one thing in common – they are exposed to a gigantic mind which decides if they are pleased with the seller or not. Every time someone has bought something on Ebay, they are asked to evaluate the buyer and the seller is asked to do the same.

The screenshot shows a seller preference badge on Ebay. The badge is situated at the page of every product item - this particular badge was on a product page for an Ipod charger. Before I place a bid or buy the charger directly I check the seller preference badge to see if the private person or the store can be trusted. This product is sold by the user “bluetoooth_direct_2010”; this user also has a shop on Ebay called First2Save. Clicking on the First2Save-link takes you to the seller’s Ebay store. The store might have hundreds or thousands of items. A big difference to an ordinary Internet store is that you can bid on the products. Therefore, the items are not aggregated, which means there is one list post for each product item. This makes it more difficult to browse than an ordinary Internet store.

Under the sellers ID you find the feedback score. This seller has a feedback score of 18264, which means that 18264 buyers have placed an evaluation after the purchase and 99.8 % of these buyers had a positive experience. If you want more detail you can read the feedback comments.

If the seller seems OK you just bid on the item or buy it directly (if both choices are available). Payment can be done in several ways. The most usual way is to use PayPal, which is owned by Ebay. PayPal is an Internet money transaction service which is free of charge when buying. With PayPal it is possible to buy things on the Internet without having to give anyone your credit card number – besides PayPal of course. PayPal also stores your shipping address making it very fast and easy to buy things.

Ebay clearly has its limits – everything has shipping costs and they might be substantial if the product is big or heavy. It might also be difficult to return a product if it does not work as expected. This is really not shortcomings of Ebay; it comes with their business model. Some products are suitable for Ebay, some are not.

As with other big Web 2.0 companies their API is open for Mashups (a service based on information from other services). There are for example several Mashups enhancing the Ebay search interface and comparing prices of for example Ebay, Amazon and Yahoo.