People Really Will Buy Anything
Google recently launched a new online spreadsheets application, advertised as "invite only".
In fact, there seemed to be a 3 day (or thereabouts) waiting period between applying on the site for an invite and actually recieving one. Of course, Google being Google didn't even make it clear on their site that submitting your email address would even get you an invite this year 
Like Gmail, existing users can invite others to use the service. I was an existing user.
I created an eBay listing with a few lines offering an invitation to the service, and pasted in some text from the official site. £1 each - buy it now. As you can tell, I wasn't exactly in it for the money!
After 5 days, I had sold two invitations, £1 each. After eBay/Paypal fees I'd only made about 20p, but as I said, I was doing it more just to see if I could sell any than to try to make a profit. If I'd tried, I could probably have got the buyers on to some kind of mailing list (to promote other eBay products?). Maybe next time…
There has been a bit of talk recently about creating and selling your own e-books, and the question that comes up over and over again is "Why would they buy my book when the information it contains is freely available". My little experiment here proves that people will buy pretty much anything, even if it is available in a more convinient and free way!
Comment by Dave — June 17, 2006 @ 11:12 pm
I once heard a while ago that someone bought nothing on ebay.
The listing said the winning bidder would get nothing, mailed nothing..nothing at all.
I forget what it sold for though. But anything is better then nothing.
Dave
Comment by slee — June 18, 2006 @ 12:17 pm
Someone on ebay bought a jpeg of a xbox 36 just because they didnt read the details of the auction and it went for quite a lot as they assumed it was for the actual xbox 360
Comment by burt — June 18, 2006 @ 8:07 pm
People really will buy anything that they feel will help them to save time/effort. You remember my 1st osC eBook - the one on SEO - all the info was avaialble freely, but spread across 2 or 3 forums and sites. Who wants to spend hours on end finding the info?
Slee, that's just plain old fraud - pretty sure that Oli is talking in terms of "stuff that is freely available if you look hard enough"…
Point being, human nature is geared up to be as lazy as possible…
Comment by DotComDosh — June 18, 2006 @ 10:52 pm
Not sure about invite only - I logged in with my Gmail details and got straight in. Spooky!
More of a drag to get into was Analytics - almost forgot I'd applied a few months back and the other week got a mail out the blue.
Maybe it's not invite only anymore?
Comment by Kevin — June 19, 2006 @ 2:29 pm
Their was an article once about ebay and I think its now a proper business, where a guy was selling toast on ebay, he wanted to see if people would buy and how much they paid for it.
From the article he was getting good revenvue and wass ending toast with a stamp on all around the world.
And again from many moons ago when ebay traders were selling official Queen portraits authorized by the queen herself and were going for over £25 and the buyer was ending up with a 1st class stamp
Hope tha helps,
Kevin
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