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E-Bay seems to be losing popularity. Hiking up charges to sellers for listings and charhing more for using Paypal as well. From the buyers point of view there are far fewer bargins to be had as the balance between private sellers and those selling as businesses changes.
I did come up with an idea for a centralized shopping experience after 500 shops quit last month. Shared cart, payment. A little like Ebay shops, but quicker and easier and only new items. A web within a web for retailers.
As brilliant as an idea it could be, this is a big boy thing and it's a catch 22. To get buyers you need shops & vice versa. When we sat down and worked it out, we reckoned we need a few million quid to get it off the ground, then we had to compete with Ebay. Concusion was someone like Google could walk into the market and set up Google shops and we'd be screwed.
Well the Leeds based payments provider Nochex ran Nochex Classified for a while, until it ran out of steam. Then last year they decided that it wasn't a core product: