Ebay

I always have ideas and suggestions to make. Here is an e-mail that I recently send to E-bay.
I always think you might as well share ideas - if not you'll only forget them - and hence some of the reasons for having a blog

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I have some suggestions for improvements to services for buyers
(as these seem far weaker than services for sellers)

Firstly I would like to point out that often I want to buy a particular
thing, and that there may well be many many auctions going on for very
similar items. Of course I only want to end up with one, so putting
multiple bids on many items is a problem, especially when many auctions
end at very simmilar times. I do not want to spend my life in front of a
computer using e-bay, after having lost on one item to start bidding on
another.

I would like a feature so that I make an ordered set of bids on items
(possibly with different maximum bids for each).
When one auction ends or I am outbid this puts in my bid for the next.
If I win one item the "chain" of bids is stopped.

I also would like to see an estimated final price. It is always
disappointing to lose an auction. I often track similar items in my ebay
to work out the required price to win. I know that with your search
engine you can look for ended items that were similar but this is time
consuming. Could you provide a link to ended similar items (i.e. a
research tool using past data) or even better an estimate finish price,
by using this info. You must have some of the similar item technology as
you send out similar items in the loosing bid e-mails.

The third and last thing I would like to ask for is again a research
tool. I know you can store customised searches in my e-bay. The problem
is that you tend to look at the same items again and again when you
repeat the search - which can be very annoying. I want to be able to do
a search, mark certain items to watch and ignore the others. Therefore
next time I do the search I should not have to classify any items again.
The idea is to show me new items that may be of interest and not old
ones.

I know that you must get lots of suggestions and will not be
disappointed when these are not implemented but I thought I would mail
you anyway. If you wanted more info I would happily explain these more.

Ideas in summary
1) ordered "chain" of bids
2) provide list of similar already ended items and estimated end price
to aid bidders
3) provide my e-bay stored searches with a memory on what to ignore i.e.
what's new
(this should be easy tp implement as you only need to store the time
when the search results were last looked at)


PS The community forum directs suggestions at the "Contact Us" section
where none of the categories fit in with "suggestions". In fact that
page seems overly prescriptive!

Regards and Happy New Year
and thanks for all your hard work on the e-bay service
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