Stanford students beat eBay on Firefox toolbar
A group of design students at Stanford University have released an eBay toolbar for Firefox, myEBayFox, with some great bells and whistles. Besides basic search features, it removes external ads onthe site and allows users to see thumbnail pictures on ALL search items, even those sellers didn't pay for. An eBay toolbar has been long overdue. Users have petitioned for one on eBay discussion boards since October of 2005. Succumbing topopular demand, the eBay Developer's Program put a Firefox toolbar in the pipeline, but it seems that the Stanford students beat them to the punch. eBay can't be too enthusiastic about this toolbar since it cuts directly into its main sources of revenue: ads and thumbnail fees. But eBay users get a really good deal.
posted by News Guy at 8:13 AM - permalink
17 Comments:
eBay can't be too enthusiastic about this toolbar since it cuts directly into its main sources of revenue: ads and thumbnail fees
I think eBay's main source of revenue is actually the commission they take whenever somebody sells something on eBay. Ads and image hosting seem rather secondary. If people buy more stuff on eBay, I'm pretty sure eBay will be happy.
There is actually an official eBay extension here
I have been using the student project version that I told you about....It is superior to the firefox version...It has adblocking and the image display hack that makes ebay listings ever more fun to browse. Stay tuned for more stuff from Stanford.
"Users have petitioned for one on eBay discussion boards since October of 2005. "
"eBay can't be too enthusiastic about this toolbar since it cuts directly into its main sources of revenue: ads and thumbnail fees. But eBay users get a really good deal."
eBay is mad because someone ate their lunch. There was a need and a request made; but they were slow to market.
What happens if a commercial company created the tool bar with their own adverts and took away the advertising accounts from eBay all together? It could be worse.
You snooze you loose.
DISCLAIMER: I don't use eBay.
As someone else pointed out, Firefox slogan is "Take Back the Web" so I don't see anything wrong with this.
Alas for us 'international' folks, the tool seems locked to ebay.com. But it looks good. Shame I can't use it in earnest.
Very good stuff but locked to ebay.com so no good for ebay.com.au
Fantastic....except ebay.com only
If you can select which ebay site you want, this will be peachy !
You could try browsing to "about:config" and filter for "myebayfox" and see if a setting similar to "ebay.com" shows up. Change that to your local ebay site and you'll be set. I'd test that myself but I don't use ebay often enough to install the plugin.
Gallery images are the biggest cash cow eBay has. Banner ads will be the second biggest shortly. Neither of these statements regard their subsidiary companies. eBay will really be squirming if this catches on, and with 50 million eBay users, if promoted properly, Mozilla could take a big chunk of them.
You may also see eBay legal department in action... when eBay sees their revenue $$$ threatened, they are fast to send in their legal eagles to intimidate, bully and remove the pest. Here is a post from Mr.Monicker user on eBay forums
A couple of years ago eBay went to court in Germany in order to forbid a developer of a freeware to distribute his program.
It was a program by which you could prove shill bidding. The software showed the complete interaction between several eBayers' IDs on a grid with percentages and all.
You just entered 2 or more eBay IDs in a grid and it showed you, for example, that ID3 had put 250 bids on the 500 items sold by ID1. Of these 250 bids, 10 only were winners. A typical shill bid result.
Latest versions of this freeware even showed the time between auction end and feedback left. If it was something like ''3 hours'', then you know what was going on.
But eBay had this freeware forbidden by the German court.
I don't know what happens if you make a google search for ''download sellersbestfriends''. You may be able to find a version.
link to the post in the context of the full thread
http://tinyurl.com/yqk4y8
Thanks for all of the great feedback. I will make sure to forward all of the comments here to the team working on this project. I am their team coach for the class.
There are already firefoox toolbars for Ebay. Groowe Toolbar is a great example, except EBay it includes Amazon, Google, Yahoo! and all others.
I just came across this post (very helpful!) and saw the comments about the toolbar not being available for sites beyond the US eBay site. I'm hoping this might help. The download page currently says, "Note: The toolbar currently works only for www.ebay.com. International versions (e.g. ebay.de, ebay.co.uk, etc.) will be in the next release. If you install it now, it will automatically update to the international version when we release it." So, it might be worth an install or a bookmark, even if you can't use it right away.
Nice plugin works very well. As for the issue with being useable on ebay.com only, I did a very quick hack around (very simple and I'm not going to explain it as if I need to then you don't know enough to do it anyway) and it works perfectly on .co.uk as well. Nice work.
I use the eBToolbar. It is free at www.ebtoolbar.com. Works great for Australia, Canada, UK & US. This guy offers Explorer or Firefox versions with no ads or other junk...just straight linking to HUNDREDS of links on eBay! Have been using for over two months and love it!!!
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