ebay

Well, not exactly, but this is great - iPhone knockoffs are turning up on eBay before the real thing has even been released.

The manual is Chinese-only, so I assume the seller is one of Hong Kong’s myriad electronics peddlers. One of the pictures shows the phone in it’s packaging which includes the text “iPhone” and a famous logo, so it’s obviously a deliberate reimagining of Apple’s baby. I’d love to know what hardware and OS is in there.

BTW, if you want the real thing, there’s a story about iPhone pre-sales on eBay over here. $5K for a phone? I think I’d take more pride in buying the fake.

Story here (via pretty much everywhere, but especially Scoble and Slashdot)

Pontification below

Google Checkout, at first glance, doesn’t seem like a Paypal killer (the lower fees are attractive but its US-only, requires a credit card and has a scary list of products it won’t touch in the T&Cs - not just porn, but anything that someone, somewhere, might find offensive). Nevertheless, eBay’s response has been to take their ball and go home; the entry of Google into online payments seems to have scared them.

Maybe that’s because their customers have been crying out for an alternative to Paypal for years. It’s universally detested, but universally used, because there’s no better alternative. To be honest, I always felt that the “virtuous circle” aspect of eBay (buyers go there because sellers are there, sellers go there because buyers are there) made them pretty-much unassailable (have you looked at QXL lately?), but now I’m starting to wonder.

An eBay transaction, completed via Paypal, absolutely nickle-and-dimes the seller to death, and I think the majority of eBay users look back with fondness to eBay circa 2001. There may be an opportunity for an eBay replacement with some or all of these features:

1. lower fees
2. open API for mixing up data
3. a ban on large commercial sellers
4. a ban on junk auctions (websites, ebooks, etc)
5. more nuanced user feedback (a decent reputation system)
6. a customer-first ethos
7. improved seller’s tools (eBay’s listing tools are so bad that they’ve spawned an entire industry of add-ons)
8. Improved UI (eBay’s trapped in 1998, has confusing marketing messages everywhere, and is dog slow)

I guess the best approach would be to start out in a niche, and really service that niche, negating eBay’s one-size-fits-all approach. Collectors of small, valuable, not-too-delicate items would be an ideal market. Vinyl records? Jewellery? Lead figures? Clocks and watches? Baseball cards? Comics? Doesn’t really matter which, all are valuable and can be easily shipped to buyers. Once you’ve got that niche sewn up, you can think about expanding into other areas.

Interesting Slashdot post that disagrees with me

Reply from someone who’s actually doing it