Buy.com's new Garage Sale service for Facebook, social networks challenges eBay

[mandy]

Free listings, 5% commission on sales

Press release:

Buy.com, the Internet Superstore™, today unveiled its new Garage Sale™ service that enables consumers to sell goods directly on their business and social networking pages.

For the first time ever, goods can be bought directly on the profile page, and purchasers never have to leave the page to complete the purchase transaction. With Garage Sale, consumers no longer need to pay listing charges associated with online auction sites, and they can take advantage of significantly lower individual transaction fees.

The Garage Sale capability is currently available to Facebook users, and Buy.com plans to roll out the service to users on other online social networks shortly. Facebook users simply add the Garage Sale feature from Facebook's application suite and upload product information and photos to begin selling on their personal profile pages using Garage Sale's secure transaction capability.

"Anyone who has ever asked a friend if they knew someone who would buy their stuff understands the power of that sales model," said Gene Alvarez, Vice President, Gartner Inc. "Now, when you add the Internet's community, collaboration and sales capabilities, we will see yet another transformation of e-commerce and the dawn of online social selling."

To help Garage Sale users promote product sales, Buy.com will introduce a Garage Sale tab on the main Buy.com Web site later this year, providing a complete marketplace for independent sellers' goods to augment Buy.com’s own third-party retailer marketplace platform.

"Garage Sale allows consumers to become personal online retailers using the backing of a major Internet company like Buy.com," said Neel Grover, CEO and President of Buy.com. "As the first company to market with this embedded e-commerce capability, we see tremendous growth opportunities in providing the millions of users on business and social networks with an alternative to eBay and the ability to transform their personal profile pages beyond information-sharing." 

full press release: http://www.buy.com/corp/toc_feature.asp?loc=64926

[amy]

Buy.com will introduce a Garage Sale tab on the main Buy.com Web site later this year, providing a complete marketplace for independent sellers' goods to augment Buy.com’s own third-party retailer marketplace platform.

The retail/p2p tab concept has a very poor track record.  Amazon has been successful with integrating Marketplace items into its main store searches but its separate person-to-person tabs, Auctions and zShops, were miserable failures. The Overstock Auctions tab has never taken off.  PC Mall also tried a retail/p2p site 3 years ago when they bought the infrastructure of the old OnSale auction site.  The new OnSale auctions and user stores never took off and were eventually closed. 

[sneakymagenta]

Hooray!  A new toy for the 'cleaning crap out of their garage' * crowd! 










*i.e. hobby sellers

[amy]

[quote author=sneakymagenta link=topic=15818.msg63738#msg63738 date=1186848841]
Hooray!  A new toy for the 'cleaning crap out of their garage' * crowd! 
[/quote]

Exactly.

[bargainbloodhound]

[quote author=amy link=topic=15818.msg63746#msg63746 date=1186854446]
[quote author=sneakymagenta link=topic=15818.msg63738#msg63738 date=1186848841]
Hooray!  A new toy for the 'cleaning crap out of their garage' * crowd! 
[/quote]

Exactly.
[/quote]

Another :ditto: