TulipTools Internet Business Owners and Online Sellers Community

Quote:We don't want to be an aggregator like Oodle is. Oodle seems to be doing a pretty good job at what they do and we plan on offering them a file that they can download and parse that contains every item in our database. I don't want to be in the business of competing with them though because ultimately it means we would be competing against Technorati, Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search.

We are strictly focused on helping people buy and sell on blogs based on items that sellers list on our site. We provide features that allow buyers and sellers to management the transaction workflow (ie, you need to pay, now you need to ship, etc). We fully support and encourage people to conduct transactions off site through email or other means and we don't charge people any transaction fees for conducting the transaction through our site. I don't believe anyone will 'own' the market for all these transactions. In fact I think it is a little silly for anyone to think that they are going to have every commerce transaction go through their site. That's one of the reasons for creating the site in the first place -- how are we supposed to move passed where ecommerce is now to a time where everything is digital if people still can't "own" their own reputations?

The business model for now is context driven ads both on the site and in RSS feeds. We won't be implementing that stuff until we have enough of a critical mass to justify it -- to be honest we want to see how users like the site before we put ads on it and then slowly integrate them while incorporating user feedback to make sure things are done right. We don't plan to charge transaction fees or listing fees, the two main revenue streams of ebay