I was hoping for a better solution between the two. A more free and open ebay type auction site. Honestly, I could see a layout such as the silkroad surpassing ebay in the next 20 years.
But silkroad still charges fees. We need a marketplace that charges as LITTLE fees as possible... maybe a vendor one-time fee and then no "commission" fees
Hosting servers aren't free. It's pretty expensive to host servers. Honestly, I was thinking a market place with maybe 1-2% of fees of the TOTAL sale. Say you're processing $10MM, that's at least 100-200k to pay for servers and such. That's pretty reasonable imho.
Only if there is no back office. It might be something like Craigslist though
A lot of small sellers run their business on EBay and they need some of EBay's tools
Erm? What? Hosting an API / creating a webapp isn't that expensive. I mean, if you're doing say $10MM in sales, estimate each seller is only selling say $1000. That's only supporting 100k sellers. Say there's 900k buyers (just trying to make the numbers even). That's only 1 million hits, if the average size of each page is a few kilobytes, and the average time on the size is around 20 pages, that's still a very small imprint. Would cost maybe $10k to host the servers. The other 90-190k can go to the cost of employees (maybe 40-70 employees for this sort of operation).
Edit: That's monthly figures by the way.
I don't think business scale like that. You can look up eBay's 10-k and read there financials since they're public