Month: August 2008

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We need an eBay competitor

Problems on the Auction Block

eBay is the biggest auction site on the internet. This has generally worked well for people. More sellers provide more products to buyers. More buyers are better for sellers. But eBay has taken unfair advantage of this near market monopoly.

Over the last several years eBay has regularly increased fee percentages. For example, if you are a seller and your item ends at $150, then your ending fees will have increased over 40% in the past years. Most recently the final value fee changed from 5.25% to 8%. eBay has tried to hide this by lowering insertion fees, but the overall fees have increased dramatically. eBay also owns PayPal now and takes a cut from that transaction too. See this Fee Calculator for exact fees.

No greater service has come with these fees. eBay still has rampant fraud. Invariably people will email me as a seller asking me to end my auction early in exchange for their paying me early. It’s a Nigerian Prince type scam.

Buyers are still regularly defrauded by sellers who have built up a good reputation by numerous bogus low-cost auction transactions.

eBay has also made things bad for sellers by not allowing them to leave negative feedback for buyers. That’s right. You can leave feedback, but it has to be positive. I recently sold something on eBay and the buyer just didn’t pay. I can’t leave that person negative feedback. eBay has said that this is so that sellers do not have an unfair advantage. But all this has done provide an unfair advantage to buyers.

Competitor Please

Because of eBay’s arrogant attitude toward its customers, it is time for them to get a real competitor. The nature of an auction is that it needs lots of buyers and sellers to work. So it would be easiest for a big company with existing traffic to offer auctions.

Google is the biggest kid on the block. If they started auctions, eBay would be forced to lower prices. However, eBay is Google’s largest customer for its ads. Google has also been slow in moving into the content business, afraid to scare off its advertisers who might be competing with them. Still, Google could easily compete with eBay.

Yahoo gave up on their rival auction site about a year ago. It was odd that Yahoo search engine didn’t feature their search results over those from eBay. Still, Yahoo has many content sites and could try again to advertise a new auction site on its other websites.

Amazon’s Selling on Amazon could be a strong natural competitor. It sells at a fixed price, but has higher fees than eBay. Amazon also has a payment system that is somewhat of a PayPal competitor, but it costs even more and is difficult to use.

An unknown could also compete. But these sites have to do things like offering fixed-price auctions for fear of not enough bidders.  Etsy is for selling handmade goods. ePier is a small and simple auction site.  Overstock.com also has an auction site.

Someone should step up. There are numerous forums with people complaining about eBay’s fees and behavior. People are getting fed up and are ready for a real alternative.

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Operating System re-installs installs for virus ridden computers

Infections Beyond Repair

Most people say that once a machine is infected with a virus, there is no practical way to know for sure if it is ever truly safe. You could take out the drive, attach it to a Linux machine for scans, and run all the latest tools. But this doesn’t guarantee success.

Think of it as an arms race between the virus writers and the anti-virus writers. Many viruses re-write parts of the Windows operating system. They are written specifically to sneak past popular anti-virus software, namely Norton and McAfee.

The solution, especially for machines with nasty viruses, is a clean install of the operating system. This can’t be done from within Windows. The important data should be backed up and the drive should be formatted and a clean install should be performed.

Before the old data is put back on the computer, it too should be scanned. Even documents can contain little programs (Macros) that could contain viruses.

Client Story

A recent client in Virginia had a computer that was badly infected. After the computer booted up, supposed anti-virus software popped up indicating that there were viruses. This was certainly true, but the anti-virus software was bogus. It just asked for his credit card info to fix the problems. If he had provided his credit card, I am sure that the virus would not have been removed. He would have probably just gotten many unauthorized charges.

His computer was no longer his. He had no administrator privileges. He had no “My Computer”, no CD drive, and no task manager. His system tray in the bottom right corner only had the words “VIRUS ALERT!”.

Without much hope, I initially tried Windows is Avast! 4 Home Edition.  One feature that Avast has over the previously mentioned AVG is the ability to scan Windows before booting into Windows machines.

Unfortunately, much of the operating system had been modified, so Avast could not fix it. I removed the drive, placed it in a Linux machine, backed up and scanned the important files, and then ran Darik’s Boot and Nuke to wipe the drive.

The desktop was an HP that did not come with a restore disk, so we had to purchase another copy of Windows to install.

I told the customer how many viruses use social engineering to work. Messages appear in an email or browser pop-up window and they appear legitimate so users click on them. He asked me how to tell the real pop-ups for the fake ones. Without computer experience, it is very difficult to know.

Windows Vista has made this worse. By constantly asking people to approve even small tasks, it conditions people to just click “Okay” for everything.

His computer now is up and running again. It is behind a router with a firewall and has the Firefox web browser and Avast anti-virus.  Hopefully that will keep him safe from viruses and malware. At least he can rest assured that his machine is not currently hi-jacked after a clean operating system install.