Steve Ciolino really wanted that Ping sand wedge listed on eBay.
So the attorney and CPA, who specializes in the administration of trusts, did what most of us do: He placed a bid and hoped that when the auction closed, his would be the highest.
It was not.
Ciolino, a single father of three, was not able to monitor the auction for the coveted golf club in its final minutes because he was at work. And since about 50 percent of all eBay bids are placed during the final 5 minutes of listings, according to a study this year by Clark University, if you’re not bidding at the very end of an auction, chances are you will not win.
Thus, when Ciolino came across a couple of Cold Play CDs he wanted, and a fleece coat made “for a little dachshund,” he realized it was time to change his approach to bidding.
He went to UnWired Buyer (www.unwiredbuyer.com) and signed up for its free service.
The Austin, Texas-based Web site specializes in cutting the cord between eBay bidders and their computers.
“With half of all bids coming in the last five minutes, what happens?” asked Indraj Gill, CEO of gNumber Inc., which owns UnWired Buyer. “People schedule their life around their computer so they can be there when the auction ends. And if they don’t, they probably don’t win.”
Indeed, without UnWired Buyer, Ciolino was like most of eBay’s 157 million members: a slave to his PC in the closing minutes of an auction. With UnWired Buyer, Ciolino’s bidding process for that fleece coat went like this:
Upon discovering the auction, he added it to his watch list.
Days later, UnWired Buyer sent Ciolino’s mobile phone a text message indicating that the auction was to end in about 20 minutes, and that he soon would receive a phone call from the company.
Sure enough, with three minutes of bidding time left, Ciolino’s phone rang. An automated woman’s voice was on the other end of the line. She informed him what the current bid on the puppy sweater was.
Then, just like on eBay, Ciolino had two choices: He could enter a minimum bid increase or he could enter a proxy bid indicating the maximum he would spend on the dachshund coat.
He pressed the “7” button on his phone, followed by two pushes of the “0” button. He bid $7.
Immediately, the automated voice told him he was winning the auction and how much time was left. He was updated every five seconds or so, until the auction ended. He was told he won.
Without a PC and an Internet connection, the dachshund had its sweater.
“We synchronize with your eBay account,” said Gill. “We send you a text message 18 minutes before the end of an auction. And we call you three minutes before the end. We tell you the current price, and you can bid.”
This process on the phone is faster than on the PC.
“That’s because we’re only extracting small bits of data,” Gill said. “On the computer, you have to refresh entire screens of data to update the bid price. On the phone, it refreshes automatically, nearly in real time.”
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UnWired Buyer launched in mid-September with $1.2 million in angel investments. It has accumulated about 400 users, who have generated $107 in revenue. The site gets a percentage of eBay’s revenue on auctions won by its users. The company is also developing a paid service to handle multiple auctions on the same call.
Because the service is free, Gill expects to amass about 35 million users by the end of 2008.
“We think we can have a $100 million revenue stream just out of the eBay platform by then,” Gill said.
He also believes his Internet-buying-by-phone service can be useful for travel plans, event ticket sales and shopping for pretty much anything.
“We would dummy it down to just those particular tasks that are relevant for your transaction to take place. We’re not doing the browsing for you. You do that on your PC. We just notify you when the right item for the right price comes along.”
For Ciolino, who snagged those Cold Play CDs as well, this has worked out just fine.
“This will be very beneficial as it gets closer to Christmas,” he said. “I don’t have to check the prices on eBay throughout the day, and right at the end it lets me know what’s going on.”
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