$3,000 cash jackpot for seller listing three millionth item on ebid.net

[booksforsale]

2,407,845 auctions as of now.

If my riffmatic is any good I make that 592,155 to go.

Will somebody give me a shout before it gets to 2,999,999?

[marschenegger]

Doesn't this promotion of offering money to the person who creates the three millionth listing just make sellers list more cr*ppy items? Is this what eBid really needs? Looking at the listings in the U.K. coins and Canadian paper money categories, there's already a lot of dross, and taking the perspective of a buyer, seeing that sort of thing makes me not want to shop on this site.
I don't know if eBid is ever going to grow up and become more than just an "alternative to GreedBay". These sorts of promotions make me think that will never happen. Far more likely to happen is that GreedBay will buy out eBid and make it a subsidiary. Scoff all you want but GreedBay can't continue hiking seller fees because there is a limit to how high they can go by charging a scaled rate. They will have no choice but to swallow the competition.
BTW I realize the previous posters who quipped about selling floorboards and grains of sand were just KIDDING.
Cheers,
M

[JudesNiceThings]

You have a point!

Wouldn't it be a good idea if they publicised and ran a similar promotion for buyers?

(Can they actually keep track by number, of total site sales?)

[bykimbo]

Doesn't this promotion of offering money to the person who creates the three millionth listing just make sellers list more cr*ppy items?

Not saying that couldn't happen, but bear in mind it's for "hand-crafted" listings only, not anybody using the bulk-uploader.

[booksforsale]

Doesn't this promotion of offering money to the person who creates the three millionth listing just make sellers list more cr*ppy items? Is this what eBid really needs? Looking at the listings in the U.K. coins and Canadian paper money categories, there's already a lot of dross, and taking the perspective of a buyer, seeing that sort of thing makes me not want to shop on this site.
I don't know if eBid is ever going to grow up and become more than just an "alternative to GreedBay". These sorts of promotions make me think that will never happen. Far more likely to happen is that GreedBay will buy out eBid and make it a subsidiary. Scoff all you want but GreedBay can't continue hiking seller fees because there is a limit to how high they can go by charging a scaled rate. They will have no choice but to swallow the competition.
BTW I realize the previous posters who quipped about selling floorboards and grains of sand were just KIDDING.
Cheers,
M

From a personal point of view I can't imagine anyone going out of their way to actually try and win this - I certainly won't be. I hate listing, so if I am going to spend time doing it, I want to make sure I am listing stuff that will sell. Jokingly I said something along the lines of let me know when it gets to 2,999,999. - in other words winning this competition is more about luck than skill - you need to be in the right place at the right time. When the listings get near the 3,000,000 mark we might see some crap on here, but in my naive heart of hearts, as far as I am aware, the majority who know about this competition are those who partake in these forums. Again I might be naive, but I tend to think that those who use these forums actually do give a sh*t about how ebid is perceived and may be reluctant to list rubbish.

[marschenegger]

You have a point!

Wouldn't it be a good idea if they publicised and ran a similar promotion for buyers?

(Can they actually keep track by number, of total site sales?)

After giving your suggestion some thought, having a contest for buyers might actually be worse than a contest for sellers. Imagine if buyers signed up to eBid, placed a whole bunch of bids, and upon finding out they didn't win the contest, they decided to not pay the sellers. That would be downright ugly.

The only way eBid could reward a milestone buyer is to not tell anyone of their intentions (i.e. announce that the 3-millionth sale took place and such-and-such person is the winner). Of course, that scenario could be a legal nightmare as contests are difficult to run if contestants don't even know they are participating.

From a personal point of view I can't imagine anyone going out of their way to actually try and win this - I certainly won't be. I hate listing, so if I am going to spend time doing it, I want to make sure I am listing stuff that will sell.

I dislike making listings too. However, listing stuff on eBid is SO-O-O-O-OOOO much easier than listing on GreedBay, at least for me. The latter site has so much hidden script in the seller's listing form that my outdated computer gets slower and slower with each item submitted to the point that I can't get more than 6 listings done per hour (or perhaps less!). And with GreedBay telling us that their site improvements are actually a good thing, it's no wonder they have also decided to load their listing pages and the My EBay pages with lots of code, producing the same slow experience for me no matter what I'm doing on that site. If I don't get a new computer very soon, I will simply not even be able to use GreedBay. I wonder if I'm the only one with this problem!

Anyhow, don't underestimate the lengths to which some people will go to win a prize (big or small). There's a TV show in Canada called Corner Gas, and in its first season, the show's website held a contest where the person who racked up the most points playing a game on the website won an acre of land in rural Saskatchewan. More precisely, you got 300 points for completing the three levels of this game, and each level takes about a minute. The eventual winner confessed to playing the game over 8 hours per day for the ~3 month duration of the contest. And his girlfriend helped him by playing when he didn't. I'm surprised this loser actually had a girlfriend, but anyhow, he finished the contest with over 8 million points, so do the math and figure out how much time he spent playing a game on the Corner Gas website. The acre of land he won? Priceless (i.e. worth $0). Ditto for the publicity he got for winning the contest. Apparently, he was not the only person who went to such great lengths... He was overtaken for the lead in the contest a couple of times when he actually decided to get some sleep.

If any of this is untrue, may I be struck by lightning!

Cheers,
Mark

[florida33549]

http://www.ebid.net/ indicates: 2,413,874 auctions

[booksforsale]

2,456,487 auctions showing on main page today

Not much of a move in the right direction since the last post, unless people are buying stuff almost as quick as we are listing it

[Huddylion]

Yes your right the total just doesn't seem to be moving at all strange indeed unless your right people are buying more than is being listed .
I list everyday one by one my total is slowly going up, I did sell a load of records in bulk so that affected my totals and I also sold a lot of stuff at a car boot the other week, so my total went down but is going up again now I have about 10.000 sports cards to list one by one going to take a bit of time lol, got tostay off facebook and the forums here and concentrate on my listing(Not going to happen lol)