Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Biggest eBay sale in history?


The world's biggest music collection has gone on sale for a starting price of $3 million USD, not on Sotheby's, but on eBay. The collection is made up of 3 Million Records, 300,000 CDs, 6 million+ Song Titles, and it is stored in a 16,000 square feet warehouse. I may be wrong here, but I believe this to be the largest auction on eBay's history (I would like to find out if there has been a bigger one).

There are some very interesting IT law questions here. When will the contract be formed? The sale is being offered to N. and S. America, Europe, Asia, Australia (not to Africa or the Middle East). Is this for practical reasons or because of liability concerns? If someone buys it in Europe, could they claim the 7 day return policy in accordance to the Distance Selling Directive?

Further that, I notice that the recommended payment method is PayPal, and that the transaction is covered by their $200 buyer protection policy... there's a bit of a mismatch :)

We don't give the online auction market enough credit for bringing e-commerce to the masses, but I think that it is a credit to their business method that we now take them for granted.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

To my knowledge this won't be the biggest eBay sale in history. Strangely that distinction goes to the sale of the Dukes of Hazzard's car the "General Lee" which sold for just short of $10 million in 2007! Yee Haw!

See: http://www.tamebay.com/2007/05/general-lee-becomes-biggest-ebay-sale.html

Andres Guadamuz said...

Excellent, I've been trying to come up with a snarky one-liner catchphrase from the show, but all I can think of is Yee Haw!

Anonymous said...

to my knowledge the biggest purchase ever made on eBay was for a private jet plane during the summer 2008