Buy.com hopes Garage Sale lures eBayers - Yahoo! News

Yahoo reports that Buy.com will power a new Facebook application that will allow users to offer products for sale on the popular social networking site, with Buy.com handling the credit card transactions for a flat 5% commission fee. Sellers receive funds either via a check from Buy.com or through PayPal. (I wonder if that will last, or if Google Payments will be considered as an option for sellers to receive funds.)

This is an idea with big potential, especially given increasing eBay and PayPal fees that can eat up profits quickly, particularly for smaller sellers.

Unlike eBay, Garage Sale does not offer auction-type bidding for products, although suggests that haggling can be done via e-mail. Right now, fixed price sales are supported.

The Buy.com Garage Sale option is among the latest results of the trend toward widget-type applications that interact with popular social networking sites to offer a variety of functionality via the networking interface. Expanding the range of sites where sellers could use the service to sell products could be a huge boost to its success. In particular, this application appears as though it would be attractive to users of MySpace, a social network with user numbers rivaling those of eBay in the US.

Looking forward to trying the Garage Sale. The flat fee model without transaction fees should be attractive to sellers, especially those with active relationships on social networking sites.

Labels: Buy.com, eBay, facebook, Garage Sale, PayPal, Phoenix.Social.Media.Club social.networks, social.media

Top Social Networks: The Summer of Social? from Compete.com's blog, provides some interesting information about the popularity of social network sites for June, 2007, measured by number of visitors and how much attention they devote to the sites.

mySpace and Facebook are the clear winners in this measurement. The post includes a map of US mySpace users by geographic area (California and the Northeast corridor are where the greatest concentrations of mySpace users live.) Comparing the geographic distribution and density of mySpace users versus Facebook users, andthe post notes that mySpace receives 25% more visits per visitor per month than Facebook, with 72 million unique mySpace users making more than 1.3 billion total visits in June.

Today's post also includes the June ranking of the top 20 social networking sites, ranked by attention.

I found some surprises here:

• Classmates.com, arguably one of the first social networking sites, albeit cumbersome and costly, ranked #8 on the list (although with an attention decline of 19%) in June.


• QuePasa.com, recently resurrected with new ownership, made the list at #16, with an attention increase of 189% in June, the largest increase (percentage-wise) on the list (although based on the second lowest number of visits.)


• LinkedIn squeaked in at #20, although with a decrease of 6% in attention in June.


• Friendster, at #9, actually showed a 6% increase in attention in June.


• Facebook, with nearly 23 million June visitors, had an attention rating of just 1.52%, with a 19% month over month increase.


• Although more than half the sites included have seven or eight figure visit counts, none approach mySpace in terms of the attention metric.
  


• MySpace is the clear king of this ranking, with more than 72 million monthly visitors, and an attention rating of 12.75%, a month over month increase of 20%, for June.

Compete.com has numerous tools for measuring site traffic and visitor engagement. (More about the methodology used to generate this data.) These numbers may not make it easier to decide how to engage social network users, but they do provide unique data to help spot the next big thing in social media, and to put media coverage and buzz in perspective based on user data.

Also on the social networking subject, I added several new articles about Facebook to my Del.icio.us links: http://del.icio.us/sheywood/facebook today. Enjoy!

Labels: facebook, linkedin, MySpace, Phoenix.Social.Media.Club socialmedia, social.media, social.networking, socialmedia