EBay

A DEALER in antique prints has complained to eBay that the promotion of reproduction prints in the antiques category is slowly destroying the online market for originals.

CHECKOUT, the payment feature introduced by eBay last month to streamline transactions, is to be altered following a campaign against it by sellers.

Listed on eBay on October 15 with an opening bid of just $75, within seven days this gold plastic PEZ space gun dating from the late 1950s/early ’60s had attracted a final bid of $6262 (£4540). At today’s prices, that’s more than 22 times the cost of an ounce of real gold.

On September 11 Ebay suspended trading in all items relating to the World Trade Center or the Pentagon until October 1 as a mark of respect to victims and their families.

eBay has beaten predictions once again in its latest set of results, showing impressive growth in revenues as well as in the number of registered users.

IT APPEARS that simple economics may be catching up with eBay sellers, at least in the antiques and collectibles sector. Everyone knows the law of supply and demand: if supply is low and demand high, prices go up. If supply is high and demand doesn’t increase accordingly, prices go down.

A pair of early Levi’s jeans dragged from the mud of a Nevada mining town were worth far more than their weight in gold when sold through eBay on May 25.

Internet auction giant EBay Inc. is to follow Yahoo in banning the sale of artefacts from Nazi Germany, in the hope of avoiding legal problems in other countries.

THREE men have been charged with joining together to drive up prices for items they were selling on Internet auctions on EBay. The charges include one linked to a sale in which a Dutch user bid $135,000 for a fake Richard Diebenkorn painting.

ICOLLECTOR seem to be on a roll with their new eBay deal. After a good start, they have put in another creditable performance, this time at the recent Dargate Galleries sale of general antiques and collectables, reported in detail below.

WITH no pre-sale marketing other than a two-day notice on their own Website, ICollector’s first online sale with EBay saw the service get off to a good start.

A LAWSUIT that threatened to deal a fatal blow to the heart of EBay’s trading status has been dismissed by a Californian court

A WEEK after ICollector announced a major online bidding deal with EBay, TIAS, the Houston-based Web mall claiming the largest “fixed price” source of antiques and collectables on the Internet, have withdrawn from a similar arrangement.

EBay are to provide the technology for customers to bid live online at sales held by hundreds of auction houses whose catalogues can be scanned on ICollector’s Website.

SIX claimants have refiled a case against online sales giant EBay that, if successful, could deal a fatal blow to the company’s global status and have huge implications for Internet sales worldwide.

US: EBAY, the giant Internet auctioneer, has announced that it is to acquire San Francisco-based auction house Butterfield & Butterfield in a deal expected to be in the region of $260m.

THE INTERNET bookseller Amazon.com recently launched an online auction service for their customers in obvious emulation of the phenomenally successful ebay person-to-person auction community.