Bidville

» see bidville.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Bidville was a consumer-to-consumer online auction site founded in 1999. the pitch was the standard late-1990s pitch: an eBay alternative with lower fees, storefronts for power sellers, watch lists, an image gallery, and fixed-price listings as a complement to live auctions. it merged with NoBidding.com in 2001 and was acquired by Royal Palm Capital Group in August 2003.

the buyer base was American. the site was English-only and listed mostly in US dollars. it never reached Turkey at any meaningful scale. in 1999 the auction site that mattered in Ankara was GittiGidiyor, which would eventually be acquired by eBay itself in 2011. Bidville sat in the parallel universe of US auction alternatives that kept appearing in press releases and never quite ate into the eBay base.

uBid.com Holdings acquired the Bidville auction assets on 27 July 2006 for an undisclosed amount. the plan was to run a consumer-to-consumer arm alongside uBid's business-to-consumer marketplace. it lasted less than two years.

~ the record ~

~ how it ended ~

on 5 June 2008 uBid announced that Bidville would close. the company said it had been unable to find a buyer for the property. the sellers were given a transition window to wind down active listings. the URL was eventually pointed at uBid itself and the brand quietly disappeared.

the cause of death was not a single event. it was the same network effect that buried every other eBay challenger of the era. buyers went where the listings were and sellers went where the buyers were, and once eBay had both, no second-place auction site could close the gap. lower fees did not move the needle, and neither did storefronts.

~ what replaced it ~

uBid itself collapsed in 2010, partly because its parent company was caught up in the Tom Petters Ponzi scheme, and partly because the same auction market was finishing the same way for everyone outside eBay. the auction-site graveyard from this era is large. Bidville is one stone in a row that includes uBid, Yahoo Auctions, eBay Express, Up4Sale, and Bidtopia. all of them ran a variation of the same idea, and the variation was always too small to overcome the network the leader had built.

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