www.dpingram.com

Brian Burke of eBay’s Trust & Safety department has a message for anyone wishing to unload digital products on the company’s trademark auction block: You can’t.

Instead, you’ll have to bypass the traditional transaction-based system that drives the vast majority of sales on the website and publish classified ads for things you want to sell that you can’t quite hold in your hand. The company cites the risk of feedback manipulation as a main reason for is choice to relegate sales of digital goods to a venue with non-auction parameters. The new rule was enacted March 31st.

If we’re to take human nature into account, this is a new law that understandably needs to be implemented and enforced. While it’d be an absolute pleasure to discover that all sellers looking to hawk bits to buyers work to do so through wholly legitimate means, it’d be much too much to expect for such business to be conducted entirely aboveboard. Rampant and unwarranted duplication would ensue, and because eBay is beholden to regulating activity within its auction framework (including the Buy-it-Now listings), it’s reasonable for the company to move to quash any allowance of digital sales via ordinary means.

Nonetheless, the company smartly still offers sellers interested in marketing digital goods the option to list classifieds devoid of any bidding utilities, in which it plays a sort of indirect facilitator of fully-electronic transactions. Sellers are required to pay a standard 30-day insertion fee of $9.95, plus any desired listing upgrades.

This from Mashable here

Next week Hotswap launches officially and opens up their site with full functionality.

Hotswap is targeting the $370 billion/year U.S. used car market with a free, video-focused classifieds site. Listings are optimized to allow users to quickly upload video of the car with a camera phone or other low end video equipment. (smart)

Both normal users and car dealers can upload listings. The company has inked a deal with Red McCombs Automotive, which will upload all of their used cars to the site. Other business development deals are being negotiated now.

They’ve raised around $1 million in capital from Kinsey Hills Group, the investors behine Scribd and others. Hotswap competes with Vast, eBay, Edgeio and many others.

Via Techcrunch

I was fortunate enough to meet with Isabelle Ratinaud, MD Europe of Qype, at London OCC a few weeks back. She explained how Qype was putting the power back into the hands of consumers with its local review website. Qype takes word of mouth to new levels and magnifies the sorts of conversations that previously only took place in pubs to a new level - a worldwide level.

In the ‘old days’ you’d hear about good or bad service in discussions you had with people you met. In the days of email, IM, social media and sites like Qype this word of mouth power is not just limited to the five people you meet in the pub, but expanded to the millions of people online.

Qype, which is Europe’s largest local review service, currently has around 40,000 registered users and more than 60,000 reviews, prompting Red Herring to cite it as one of the 100 sites to watch for 2007.

What I particularly liked about Qype is the way that users are encouraged to participate by earning ‘points’ and achieving a Qype ranking. Its a simple system, but one that does recognize users’ involvement and stimulate them to take action.

Of course there are also the expected social networking aspects, in that each user can create a profile of themselves, complete with tags that denote their interests, a record of all their reviews, even upload photos of themselves - a nice tip-of-the-hat to Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. Registered users can also add others as friends (contacts), and send person to person messages. It has a nice community feel which all goes towards establishing a great feeling of trust in the service.

Edgeio, the aggregated classifieds website, has created a widget that lets you distribute content and enables you to sell content directly through the widget as well.

This makes it easier to distribute content because it allows customers to purchase the content via the widget, and view it immediately through the widget as well. It removes steps for paid content, and allows publishers to expand on the places their content can be seen. What’s more, is as a widget distributor, you can take a cut of the sales made. This is like earning ad revenue, but for direct sales of content, instead.

The widget can be used by any publisher, from a newspaper to an e-zine or a blog. Pick and choose which content will be sold through the widget (podcasts, text, images, etc.) and place it on your site or encourage others to place it on their site as well. It’s a good way for publishers to retain their branding while spreading full access to their content. I consider this a good way of taking what Scribd has made popular and applying it to branded, paid content distribution.

Mashable

An article on UGC and classifieds is here.

It references ebay, Craigs List, Edgeio, and Blocket.

Yell.com offers free classified ads in UGC deal with Oodle

Yell.com is to allow customers to post free classified ads for the first time, in a deal with search engine Oodle.co.uk.

Oodle.co.uk specialises in collating classified ads by searching numerous websites, such as Ebay and Reed.co.uk. The company will update Yell.com on a daily basis, giving customers instant access to a bank of current classified ads.