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Ask HN: Why haven't online auction/general-marketplace sites been disrupted yet?

6 points by KhalPanda ↗ HN
This question (title) is born out of frustration in trying to teach my mother how to use eBay on her iPad to do simple occasional buying/selling.

Needless to say, it hasn't gone smoothly. I can't believe the complete and utter disconjunction between the various areas of the site, let alone between the apps and website. It's barely usable.

And whilst I understand a lot of the headaches and hoops they force you to jump through are to cover their own backs in attempts to protect both buyers and sellers, it's still just a complete mine-field.

Is there any good reason that sites like eBay, Craigslist, Gumtree, etc haven't been pushed aside by a sleek, modern, UX-focused SV-startup yet?

I could easily see eBay being what MySpace was to the social-network space in 2007.

6 comments

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pgt
Marketplaces with reputation-ranked user bases have strong network effects and are difficult to disrupt.
phantom_oracle
Your question probably has an answer in the form of many companies past and present attempting to do exactly what you say "disrupt". As pgt mentions, the gamification is 1 of the biggest factors in play here. Buyers will go by ratings based on other buyers and sellers with massive amounts of positive ratings have little incentive to build rep again.
auganov
Can the UX be a major disruption vector here? I don't think optimizing this model is a game changer, just an incremental improvement.

There's interesting startups on the seller side that let people instantly get money for their goods and take care of the whole process making it friction-less. I think what will eventually disrupt general marketplaces [eBay] is simply sellers fleeing to seller-specific services and buyers using retail-oriented sites (like amazon) with a better experience.

joshdance
Interested in a 'seller-specific' service. Is that sellers grouped together or a service that caters to sellers?
auganov
I was thinking of services that help you sell stuff. I don't know who's currently in that space, but say usesold.com was an example of such a service. Amazon does a somewhat similar thing with used books I think.
yen223
Network effects. Sellers won't come without buyers, but buyers won't come without sellers. This vicious cycle is not easily disrupted.