May 2008

I remember the last time I blogged about lifelock, someone came and left a comment saying some crap about them. I just assumed it was another company with Lifelock on Google alerts that wanted to bring them down.

Now someone else is creating trouble for Lifelock, with Experian - a credit reporting agency - having a dig at Lifelock, saying that the laws actually don’t allow for the existence of a service like Lifelock.

Lifelock offers identity protection for their members against having their details stolen. Now, the real problem is that their service is ruffling a few feathers because it gets fraud alerts put out for its clients. Experian doesn’t like doing this because it costs them money. How about that, providing a service that you make millions off actually might cos a bit of money to provide every now and then.

Anyway, if you’re a US resident and don’t want your SSN and other goodies picked off by the bad guys, go check out Lifelock and they might have something you could benefit from.

If you’re Australian and fed up with selling on eBay there’s good news. An auction site has been launched for those who want to sell there.

And that’s not all of it. There’s no charge for a basic listing.

I’ve just taken a look at The Trading Post’s auction website and… it’s not so easy to find first up. Here’s The Trading Post home page.

Besides the ad for the auctions on the page, there’s very little - well, basically nothing - in the way of navigation to the auctions above the fold. Only when you get to the bottom are auction items even mentioned!

So that’s bad point number one for a potential Aussie seller. You want buyers, and The Trading Post makes it very difficult for the casual surfer to happen upon the auctions. As a web designer I know from experience that they have way, way overestimated #1 the intelligence of their users and/or #2. the patience of their users to search for something not right in front of them.

Following on from that I attempted to list an item. But the items that I sell on eBay - Chumbys - don’t have a natural category. No surprise, they don’t have one on eBay either. However, their website doesn’t even have an “other” or “miscellaneous” category - anywhere! And not only this, the current list of categories is terribly lacking in any form of comprehensiveness.

The Chumby is a computer/alarm clock, that plays internet radio to you and the weather.

I then cruised around the rest of the categories and most of them are horribly limited in their scope. Whoever put the categories together is either terribly unimaginative or lazy. It’s not like eBay was online the entire time the website was up so they could take ideas from it… oh wait, it was.

Anyway it’s an exciting announcement for my Australian seller readers given that they would save on the hideous eBay/Paypal monopoly fees, however if the early indications show anything Trading Post aren’t really all that serious about this auction site and seem to me to be hoping to fluke on a massive success with little if any effort.

I just sold something on eBay for $274.

When it’s all said and done with eBay and Paypal’s fees, guess how much I will have?

$248. That’s right. $248.

Why?

Insert fee: $2.50

Closing price fee: $7.60 or something like that.

Paypal fee: $6.

Then what happened to the rest is I got crunched on exchange rates. Crunched.

Paypal and eBay are known in many circles as the evil twins and you can see why. They’re owned by the same company (which also owns Skype, just wait to get screwed over there too). You can see why they get so much negative press nowadays.

If only Google owned Skype, eBay and Paypal. Sure, they’d basically be all powerful, but they’re much more geared towards providing free services than eBay Inc.