Tom Altman’s Wedia Conversation

So - I need a new cordless telephone…and let me tell you - I am a cheapskate when it comes to consumer electronics. My old unit got a bit too much of last week’s lightning.

So I head off and find a model I like - the Uniden TRU9280-4 (the “-4″ stands for 4 handsets; “-3″ is three and so on.) So I put the search into eBay and find 3 main “auctions” and 20+ hits in the eBay stores section.

But instantly I’m a little miffed - because all 3 of these so called auctions are “Buy it Now” - OK, I love the concept of buy it now…but it was not meant to be used as a fix price auction - that is what the eBay stores are for. So I decide to look over at Amazon - and boom, for almost the same money I can get a brand new model with free shipping.

It just compliments what I have been saying for a while about eBay - the deals are getting harder and harder to find. I still think you can find some stuff there, but it takes more work and more work is not what the consumer is looking for.

This could be a major thing that drives traffic back to the local retailers. With innovations like we saw at the Web 2.0 conference - where intuit is teaming up with and acquiring companies who can take the inventory people are entering into Quickbooks and displaying it online…hyper local is becoming more of a reality. If I can log onto a local retailer’s site and see exactly what they have, now that is information I can use.