Are the burgeoning online auction rooms a haven for hoaxers and hucksters, or the free market at its best? Oliver Burkeman investigates
If you have craved, for almost as long as you can remember, a signed photograph of former French president Valry Giscard d’Estaing, there’s a man in North Carolina who can see you right for as little as $40.
Or perhaps stuffed squirrels are your thing? A woman in Pennsylvania has one going spare for $41; the squirrel is holding a nut in its paws and is, the seller confides, “very nice”.
But if none of these takes your fancy, don’t worry: at the time of writing there are 2 735 003 other items like this offered.
To the untrained eye, this stuff looks like junk. But this is eBay, the world’s biggest Internet-based auction house, and here there’s no such word as junk.
Around 250 000 new auctions get under way at eBay every day, and anyone can put anything up for sale in more than 1 500 subcategories of headspinning specificity, from Collectibles-Bottles-Fruit Jars (683 auctions) to Miscellaneous-Household-Pet- Supplies-Reptile (112 auctions).
It was here – amid the coffee-makers and the maternity wear and the art deco lounge chairs (bids from $300 the pair, please) – that a man preferring to be known only as Hchero, from Sunrise, Florida, recently tried to sell one of his kidneys. Hchero invited bids from $25 000. “Of course, only one for sale,” he pointed out. “I need the other one to live.”
eBay moved swiftly to remove the auction from its lists – United States federal law punishes the sale of human organs by up to five years in prison or a 32 000 fine – but not before bidding had soared to 3,7- million.
Hchero, it seemed, had started a trend: within days, another kidney was advertised with a reserve price of $4-million; earlier this week, a seller called Flook from Massachusetts was purportedly offering a human liver, “freshly removed from a healthy 25-year-old male . on ice at university”. Three auctions were posted offering babies, at least one of which was yet to be born. Fully functioning human beings, though, proved to be in less demand than their constituent parts, and bids peaked at a mere $109 100 before the plug was pulled.
eBay dismisses most of these exotic offerings as hoaxes, and in the case of the babies and the liver it’s hard to argue with that assessment.
But the truly extraordinary thing about eBay and its myriad smaller rivals – places such as Barter-n-Trade, AuctionInc, BidtoBuy and Whatabid – is not the macabre sales propositions of dubious credibility that are made on the wilder fringes. What is extraordinary is how the vast, unfettered market facilitated by the online auctioneers is redefining junk, investing the kind of things most people dismiss as irredeemable rubbish with a whole new value – because there is guaranteed to be someone, somewhere, to whom it isn’t rubbish.
The Internet may not yet be living up to its promise as a utopian tool of democratisation, but as a mechanism for linking supply with demand, it’s unmatched. And there is always demand.
The Internet auction houses, some argue, represent a return – if we were ever there in the first place – to a purer, more efficient and maybe even fairer form of commerce.
“The auction houses are one manifestation of a very important phenomenon that is taking us towards an idealised free market of the kind Adam Smith, over 200 years ago, might have expected,” says Professor Danny Quah, of the London School of Economics, who has written widely on the “weightless economy” of which the Internet and related technologies are a part. “Some people think these developments are going to require the rewriting of capitalism. But that’s going to be a very easy rewriting: all it involves is transcribing the original rules of capitalism.”
With drastically lowered barriers to access and faster, clearer channels of communication, buyers and sellers can do business in ways that eliminate many of the imperfections that are the cause of capitalism’s inequalities.
Not everyone is so enthusiastic. Among those urging caution is Dr Monica Seeley, a visiting fellow at the Imperial College School of Management in London. “I think it’s a huge bubble that’s going to burst, and there’ll be tears,” she says.
Rewriting the rules of capitalism may turn out to be easier than rewriting the rules of the car-boot sale. But even by the standards of conventional capitalism, eBay is doing staggeringly well. Since Pierre Omidyar started the site in September 1995 as an amateur Web page to help his girlfriend fuel her obsession with Pez candy dispensers, the company, based in San Jos, California, has reached a market capitalisation of 11-billion. By charging sellers small fees for listing items on the site it is, almost uniquely among the innovative firms at the vanguard of online commerce, turning a profit.
In a telling example of the colonisation of physical space by cyberspace, it recently bought out the respected San Francisco auction house Butterfield and Butterfield. eBay may not yet be a serious challenger for the big conventional auctioneers’ headline-grabbing sales of fine art and celebrity memorabilia, but the lower strata of Sotheby’s and Christie’s catalogues do overlap with goods available online, and the major houses are cottoning on.
“We won’t immediately move to the idealised marketplace, because there are new implications – to do with fraud, anonymity, privacy and identity – that become much more important now the other barriers have been removed,” says Quah.
John C Dvorak, an Internet commentator and columnist for PC Magazine, is convinced this free-for-all won’t remain quite so free, as buyers and sellers realise there are gains to be made from doing all their trading in one place. He predicts a future in which the online auction business will become concentrated on a handful of successful sites. Before long, there may be only a tiny number of locations at which to find that art deco chair, that cream bowl in the shape of a mallard, or that kidney.
Check out online auction sites www.eBay.com, www.Barter-n-Trade.com, www.AuctionInc.com, www.BidtoBuy.com and www.Whatabid.com