In case you hadn’t noticed, we are no longer Fleabay. Starting today, Fleabay is now known as OnlineAuction.me. We think the name much better reflects the focus of this site: online auctions.

We think online auctions are a very social experience for the buyer and seller. Buying at online auctions is a great way to save money and even have fun shopping, but it also can be very competitive. As we roll out more social features, we think that having a name that fits the social elements of our community just makes sense. Fleabay was a fun name, but OnlineAuction.me puts the focus on you, the buyer/seller/end user. Making online shopping fun and exciting is what we are trying to do and we think the new name, branding, and domain will really help us do that.

With this new brand also comes a brand new design. It is very similar to the old design and we haven’t added any new features in this upgrade. However, the search box is easier find and the overall design is lighter and cleaner. We hope you like the new site and we will continue to keep you posted as always with site updates and more.

Hey everybody, just wanted to let you know that we just added search to the site. You can now search for anything via the built-in search bar in the header of every page of the site. We haven’t integrated it with the blog yet, but that is next on the to-do list, so look for that in the next few days as well.(Search is now on the blog too!!!!) So what can you find with the new search? For now our search pulls results from eBay as well as our internal content engine, so as we add content, you’ll find it right from within the search. This will make Fleabay a lot easier to use and we’re very excited to share it with you.

On eBay, your feedback is hugely important to your success buying or selling. Feedback impacts your ability to sell much more than your ability to buy. For example, eBay won’t let you sell an item with a buy it now option unless you have 10 positive feedback. Without “Buy it Now”, you don’t give your customers the option of buying your item on the spot. They have to wait for the auction to finish, just like everyone else. Also, people tend not to trust a seller that doesn’t have a high feedback rating. Thus, it is imparative that your feedback rating is exceptional.

So, if you want to sell things, you need feedback, but to get feedback you need to sell things right? Nope! You can get positive feedback from buying things too! The quickest/easiest way is to buy cheap things that are say below a dollar. Ideally these would be things that you want to buy anyway, or things that you could give away easily.

Another idea is that you could buy things on eBay and then sell them again on eBay. This could be espeically useful if you see something that you can buy for cheap, but you can sell it for more by changing the listing. This technique if done properly should allow you to at least break even, or limit your cost to buy positive feedback while improving your online selling skills at the same time. The other neat thing about selling the things you buy on eBay back on eBay is that you know that there are willing buyers out there, after all, you just bought that item too didn’t you?

The last trick is the most obvious. Do an ebay search for “positive feedback” and you’ll likely come across an auction like this. It is an auction for a positive feedback design. Essentially what the seller is selling is an automatic positive feedback to your account. Some sellers might actually print out a piece of paper and mail it too you, but mostly it’s just a way to sell a positive feedback without getting in trouble with eBay. Positive Feedback seems to go for about $1 each, so to get that 10 or 20 feedback to get off the ground, it will cost you about $20.

One word of caution, if you are buying positive feedback, try not to go too overboard with it. Get just enough that you can sell effectively without spending too much time or money. If your goal is to sell things on eBay for a profit, having good feedback is just one component to that equation, it’s not the silver bullet to your success.

Hey everybody, I wanted to let you know that we are very excited to announce the re-leaunch of Fleabay. We have a brand new format and exciting new content to bring to you. The biggest change is that we killed our community install of the pligg system. This doesn’t mean that we are no longer going to have a community component to this site, but rather, we are switching gears to make things easier for you, the users.

The new focus is to make it easier to find auctions on eBay that is interesting in a less-random way. That means we are going to track down what you want to find and find it for you in an easier to navigate way. The format will be very similar to what you see on the front page now, but we will also provide more advanced information regarding product information, pricing information, and more.

What you see now is just the first step. We plan on continuing to add features, making the site easier, and just plain better for everyone to use.  More to come, stay tuned!

Hello all, I’m not sure how many of you actually read this blog, but nonetheless I have an announcement to make. Fleabay is changing - dramatically. A lot of the changes will be felt in areas like the whole social shopping experience that we were trying to create. By and large, it didn’t work quite the way we wanted it to, so we are shifting gears to make something that is more in line with the philosophy behind the original idea of the site.

We really wanted to create a community built around the whole eBay experience where people vote on and share interesting things they find on eBay. That is all well and good, but what we found is that it just isn’t quite working as planned. Since launching the site I’ve been brainstorming about how to really hit the concept that was originally intended. That is, the concept of really finding interesting things and buying/selling them. It dawned on me that eBay is not the best/only place to find great and possibly weird things. In fact, there is plenty of weird junk in your own town!

Along those lines, we are going to be completely redesigning the whole site, features, everything to focus beyond eBay to the whole bizarre junk concept as a whole. We will still have cool features like finding interesting stuff on eBay, but we’ll also work to find interesting stuff on Craigslist, local Classifieds, anything and everything. There is more to come, but be on the lookout. There are big big changes coming.

You might have heard about the construction worker who buried a Red Sox jersey in concrete at the new Yankee Stadium in hopes of creating a “curse” for the New York Yankees. It was all over the news last week. Anyhow, as it turns out, that jersey is up for sale on eBay right now!

So far the bidding is all the way up to $30,000 and the proceeds go to The Jimmy Fund, which is a charity to help fight cancer at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Hopefully the bids keep getting higher and this auction goes even higher.

Since this site is about eBay, I figured it’d be just as well if I at least discussed the fact that eBay isn’t perfect. In fact, in some ways it’s a broken system without any replacement in sight. So, without any further ado, here are ten things I hate about eBay.

1. Nigerian Scammers - Ok, I just wanted to get this out of the way. The amount of scams that still exist on eBay is somewhat astounding. You would think that it’d be less by now but it’s not.

2. Dropshippers - Five or more years ago, dropshipping might have been all the rage, but these days with everyone using the same suppliers it’s turned auctioning on eBay into a zero sum game. Everybody takes the Wal-Mart approach and drives prices down to the point where there’s no profit. It’s not sustainable, but nobody seems to care.

3. Get Rich With eBay e-Books/Videos/etc. - Did you know that there is a cottage industry built around teaching people how to “get rich with eBay”. Most of these “informational products” teach you how to dropshop products on eBay. Yet, as I said in the last thing I hate - there are minimal profits in dropshipping. Apparently the profits are in selling people on the idea that eBay dropshipping is an awesome way to get rich.

4. Ugly Auction Templates - With all the billions of dollars that eBay has, couldn’t they do more to spruce up their auction templates? Despite eBay’s best efforts to stay fresh with their site design, auctions remain as ugly as ever. The ghost of 1999 design standards haunt us still.

5. Why Skype? - Skype is cool. No question, but why did eBay spend billions for it? It’s two years later and email is STILL the only way that buyers and sellers communicate. Skype will probably never make the billions back for eBay that they paid for it. eBay could have just dropped their fees by 25% and made the buyers and sellers happier and grown their business more than Skype did.

6. Terrible Ads - Can you explain what “Shop Victoriously” or “Get IT on eBay” has to do with actually getting people to buy my stuff on eBay? Why not just “the best deals are on eBay” or something like that? Why does eBay try and rebrand itself as something new when it’s the same exact thing it’s been since the 90’s?

7. eBay Express - “An exciting new way to shop” says the title of the page. Of course, that’s a lie. A huge lie. Taking eBay and making it into a generic e-commerce site is neither exciting or new. It’s basically recreating Amazon.com. Woo! Exciting! Not.

8. 100 of the Same Listing from the Same Seller - A lot of this has to do with certain products being popular and part of it has to do with the fact that dropshipping is as popular as it is, but on even some fairly obscure items, it’s pretty bad. If a seller has 10 items available I don’t want to see 10 individual listings from that seller. Instead, eBay could intelligently group them instead of giving away so much of the auction listing real estate to a seller willing to spam eBay listings. As a buyer, this kind of stuff just frustrates me.

9. eBay Community Garbage - In an effort to build the eBay community into something more social, eBay has crafted a number of extra sites, content sections, etc. and they’re largely useless garbage that is meant to try and latch on to whatever is popular at the time. For instance, eBay blogs, eBay Match Ups, Best of eBay, etc. The eBay forums themselves aren’t half bad, but they aren’t outstanding either. I just wish eBay would stick to one community segment and focus their energy on making it great instead of spewing garbage for the sake of following trends.

10. Craigslist - Why does a non-eBay site make me hate eBay? Simple - it’s free and popular. That is to say, often times sellers list the exact same item in both places. While as a buyer I think that can be a good thing. It can save money buying on Craigslist, probably save on shipping too. Yet, this really shows something eBay’s been bad at for a while - pricing their service. eBay charges whether you win or lose, eBay charges whether the upgrade helps or not, eBay gets paid no matter what. Yet, even though eBay offers better choice, user experience, etc. people are starting to choose Craigslist and I don’t blame them. At least Craigslist doesn’t charge for something they don’t deliver.

That’s ten things I hate about eBay. Actually, as I wrote this I came up with more, but that will have to wait for another list. In the meantime, what do you hate about eBay?

Hey all, I have some exciting news. Fleabay is ready to be shown to the world! While our old testing site was open to the public, we didn’t really try to tell a lot of people about it because there were quite a few bugs left to iron out. Over the summer we’ve been busy adding a lot of new features, fixing things, and moving servers to accommodate future growth. Now that those things are taken care of, we are opening the site to the world at large. The real domain for the site is fleabayit.com. If you bookmarked our old domain, we’ve gone ahead and redirected it here, so you can still find us.

Since this is a beta, that means we aren’t finished making Fleabay. We have some really cool things currently in development that we will announce as soon as we are ready to release them, but until then enjoy the site. If you have any problems with the site, just comment on this post with a description of the problem and we will do what we can to fix it ASAP.

This is a new feature here on Fleabay. We are going to start doing an Auction Of The Week award for the coolest auction that gets submitted. Admittedly, this is a totally subjective award, so if you don’t like it perhaps you could bribe us, or get all your friends to vote up your auction. Anyhow, you don’t get anything for winning this award yet, but going forward we will probably send out free t-shirts or random eBay schwag. Don’t worry, if you win the AOTW award now, you will get your prize when we start giving them out.

Now, this weeks winner is none other than East Bound & Down Loaded (eBay Page). What makes this auction so cool? Well for one, it’s a mystery auction. You don’t really know what you’re bidding for. That makes it exciting right? More than that, the auction is in memory of the auctioneer’s father. There are cool stories and memories posted on there. Also, it’s got a bizarrely awesome template. It’s somewhat hideous to look at, but the background song totally fits and I love it. It straddles the line between awesome and awesomely bad in a way that most auction’s never could hope to attain. Last but not least, you gotta love the trucker-speak. It’s classic.

Well, congrats rightbright, you are the first winner of the Auction Of The Week. You’re auction is awesome!

Hey fleabayers, we’ve got an exciting announcement to make. We’ve created the most advanced artificial intelligence that Fleabay has ever seen. Okay, that’s not saying a lot, but this is pretty cool nonetheless. We call it fleabot. What fleabot does is automatically search for and submit potentially interesting ebay auctions. The auctions fleabot submits don’t automatically make it to the front page. They still have to be voted on just like every auction. The end result is that Fleabay should have fresher and more frequent content updates. We hope you all enjoy it!