I certainly would love to have one of these little auction guys take off, but the reality is, unless you see Google or Microsoft somewhere in the name of the auction site, it is not likely much of a challenge for eBay.
Recently, Sari Hirsch was looking online for a DVD of the movie “Cheaper By The Dozen.”
She checked the Web sites she usually visits when shopping for a DVD: BestBuy.com, Target.com and eBay.com.
Then she stumbled across a site with a funny name: WhaBam.com. That’s a Santa Clara online auction start-up that competes with the likes of eBay. Hirsch found her movie and bought it using an option called “Instant Buy” for $14.
“It was a refreshing site,” she said. “It’s simple to use. There’s a pull-down menu on the home page, and you can pick from 10 to 15 categories like home, electronics and collectibles. From there, you can search for your particular item.”
WhaBam’s president, Eren Niazi, 29, has been developing the Web site for four years. It launched in October.
“It basically provides people with a low-cost alternative to the auction space,” Niazi said. “Most sites charge you to list an item, but we actually charge you nothing until your item sells, and then we only charge 1 percent of the sale price, which, as far as I know, is the lowest fee out there.”
There is even a more affordable fee structure for frequent auctioneers.
“It’s called `Fee Buster,’ ” Niazi said. “List as much as you want. Sell as much as you want. It costs you a flat fee of $50 per month. It’s cheaper than Web hosting.”
In 2001, he launched his first company, Open Source Storage, which makes servers and data storage systems based on open-source software. Based in Sunnyvale, it employs 35, and Niazi expects it to grow to 100 during the quarter.
While the WhaBam site has only a tiny fraction of the listings of eBay (a recent search of the “books” categories revealed 10 listings on WhaBam compared with about 604,000 on eBay), Niazi said his auction site is maturing quickly.
“We currently have 18,000 items for sale, and 3,000 to 4,000 members log in every day,” he said. “Within the next three months we’ll have over 100,000 items listed.”
Eren Niazi on February 25th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
Here is some more recent news:
http://www.whabam.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=7
fin212 on December 21st, 2006 at 5:29 am
It really amazes me ,you have all these people that complain about eBay’s fees yet they keep on supporting them and they give the smaller guys that are offering a much better deal that can not even be compared with, the flick.