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Comment by jason13 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it..I do not see how auctomatic can defend their company from eBay just redoing some of it's UI.

Read Paypal Wars if you want to know how that's done. They spent their entire existence about a week ahead of being crushed by eBay. The trick is to start with brilliant people, hire more brilliant people, and give them all stock options. Or something. They might have just had a longer outlook: if competing with eBay was a zero-sum game and eBay was worried about a bad quarter, Paypal could come out ahead by accepting bad quarters in exchange for good years. I think that's essentially what they did: eBay could (for example) lose 10% of their customers by completely locking out Paypal, or they could try to winnow that down to 5% or 1% or so by coming up with Paypal-like features.

i think the idea is that they will innovate and add features much faster than e-bay or other competitors will.

from a user's perspective, i would much rather use the tools and software provided by a capable team that caters to my needs. that said, you don't really need a brilliant team, just one that does the job better than other current competitors. this is a great opportunity that aligns well with the strengths of the founders.

eBay seems to do everything in their power to prevent usability. Auctomatic hopefully will capitalize on this.

What happens if ebay decides they don't like what they're doing, and shuts them out or makes it hard to connect?

Of course always a possibility (myspace/photobucket), but I was just supporting Auctomatic's decision seeing as at every turn eBay seems to make their tools harder and harder to use.

There are a million reasons why Auctomatic shouldn't bother, but if they are a great team you'll never be able to convince them of that.

Or just copies them.

I suppose their plan is to have ebay buy them out, and given that they've spent so little, a nice seven figure sum might work for all parties.

Then again, how open is ebay to something like this? Other sites don't mind if you use their api to make enhancements, but is ebay one of them?

What if they got a large enough user base and opened their own auction site?

I guess it would be to eBays benefit to let people use Auctomatic. And I guess it be easier for eBay to buy Auctomatic then to copy eBay.

Huh? Have you seen this?

http://www.projectsandimas.com/

Good luck beating this... it's a dream app. I've seen it demoed and power sellers were all drooling.

I have not seen this... Cool. Historically though eBay has never put any effort into creating a user friendly experience. "San Dimas" may be a sign that they are wising up and starting to realize that maybe they do have things to fear. It begs to ask, what took so long? Fear? A feeling that any change would detour users or add a new learning curve their users could not handle? Was making it a desktop version a compromise, fear that it would scare their online users? (I have no idea of course)

PayPal kicked ass, why not Auctomatic? May not be the best comparison, but one thing paypal taught us is that the idea of "ownership of users" is very blurred.

You make a very good point, Auctomatic may really have their work cut out for them. But that's what makes it fun, right?

They aren't competing against eBay.

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