Wigix

Lots of buzz the last day around the new eBay competitor Wigix. They have an interesting take on the marketplace, and you can't blame them for trying - its well known that the two "general marketplace" leaders (eBay and Craigslist) have done very little innovation in the last few years (Craigslist by design, eBay has no excuse).

Wigix' site looks ok, and the vision is interesting and ambitious (see this post by Bill Burnham for more). But at first pass I see a couple of potential issues:

1) Unlike with stocks and commodities, where all shares of MSFT or bushels of corn are the same, "stuff" is not always the same. People customize their cars, scratch their phones, etc. etc. In the current Wigix SKU pages I don't really see the ability for people to completely/richly describe their items for sale. eBay allows people to fully describe their items (including arbitrary text and pictures) - something that makes each item almost a one-off (which is sort of true), but something that also makes searching highly annoying. Wigix wants to get around this by moving closer to an idea of a commodity - but I don't know if this works. I would be wary of buying an iPod unless I am pretty sure I know what condition it's in and have seen pictures (unless I'm being told it is brand new). Wigix can probably fix this relatively easily - but it could be a challenge to do it within their commodity-like framework.

2) Wigix' vision includes people using their site as a place to keep track of all their stuff, as well as a marketplace to sell/buy that stuff. That's interesting and does make sense in a way. But I don't know if people will think about it that way. I'm willing to bet most people want a place to buy and sell, period (especially dedicated businesses - which I believe make up a big % of eBay's sellers). So it feels like the "this is my stuff" aspect of Wigix will just be superflous at best and distracting/off-putting at worst. Other "stuff trackers" have been made and have gotten limited traction. But maybe I am wrong - its possible that the stuff tracker/marketplace model is the right combination and will get big adoption.

3) Finally, I don't see a rating mechanism yet. And interestingly, the personal profile page has fields for a user's eBay ID and password so that Wigix can get to their eBay rating. This is a nice try at leveraging eBay ratings (arguably one of the most valuable pieces of eBay and built up over many years), but I have to believe eBay will shut this down VERY quickly.

In conclusion, its a pretty interesting effort. Only good things can come out of someone thinking hard about marketplaces and innovating on them.

Comments

[Alan Rothstein]

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[Steve Fouracre]

Try bideasi also, bideasi has exactly the same concept as Wigix, but without the issues that you have pointed out above.

[Bill Burnham]

Hi David,

Thanks for the link to my post. Let me "talk my own book" and respond to some of the very valid points you raise.

In terms of the variability of items, sellers on Wigix can indeed attach pictures and descriptions that are specific to their item. They also can provide owner-specific data such as current condition, color, etc. so sellers and buyers should still be able to get most if not all of the item specific information they currently get on EBay. The variability of items does limit the utility of data comparability but that obviously improves with volume and even at low volumes is better than nothing.

In terms of tracking stuff, I think Wigix would argue that the reason stuff tracking hasn't worked in the past is that there has been very little utility to it. You just kind of make a list (usually unstructured)and it sits there. Wigix's stuff tracking is theoretically better because once you register your stuff you get persistent benefits such as updates on market pricing, awareness of what friends/fellow collectors are doing, special offers from product manufacturers, permanent "make me sell" listings, etc. We'll see if that's compelling enough or not, but it is different.

In terms of ratings, yes you are correct to point out that this feature is not enabled yet, although the groundwork for it has been laid. I think you will shortly see a rating system that is far superior to what other sites offer because it relies on verified data and community input in addition to pure transactions data. The Ebay data comes from a public API that they publish. If they do shut it down, there are plenty of less elegant work arounds.

I will make sure to add your feed to my reader!