MyCubi aims to help local businesses market, trade and communicate with people in their local area.

La casa de Carlitos y Patricia has produced a spectacular (and useful) advertisement for eBay ads, the new local classified ads service that’s been launched in Spain.

This holiday season online retail giant eBay will be going analog – making the leap from the web to real-life with a pop-up shop set to open November 20th in New York City.

Yesterday PSFK attended a special event in NYC’s 57th and 5th ave shopping mecca which exhibited gift trends for 2009 based on items bought from eBay. The online retailer took the site of a former luxury retailer for a day and broke the space into four zones highlighting a specific trend in each one. eBay enlisted a team of shopping experts to dig through the site and purchase items ranging from a custom motorcycle to vintage handbags. These were then separated into the following categories:

•    “Retro Revival” – With the recession putting excess and garish spending at the forefront of [...]

Swoopo is a brilliantly addictive (some might say downright insidious) new auction website that can best be described as Las Vegas casino meets eBay. The online retailer refers to its service as “entertainment shopping,” a bidding model that offers users the chance to purchase products at deep discounts with more than one catch.
Auctions for everything from laptops to flatscreen TVs start out at the “too good to be true” price of $0.01 and go up from there in $0.01 increments until the timer counts down to zero. However, during the final moments any bid received extends the auction by 20 [...]

Creative Social points us to a campaign run by MasOportunidades.com, an Argentinian e-commerce website that is a great example of a challenger brand as made popular by Adam Morgan. Challenger brands are brands that are not necessarily market leaders but have the ambition to get there, making best use of their limited resources – an analogy often used is that of David vs. Goliath. MasOportunidades.com acknowledged that Mercado Libre (eBay’s Latin American partner) was way ahead of them, but slowly and steadily embarked on a campaign to wrest them of their lead.
Challenger brands have a range of strategies including targeting [...]

PSFK recently caught up with Karen Bard, the Pop Culture Expert over at eBay. Her insights were a follow-up to our recent coverage on the creation of instant nostalgia.

As many magazines go the way of the dodo, other publications are staying strong despite industry woes.  A recent survey of listings on eBay show that people are actively sharing issues of their favorites, even from recently defunct magazines.
Domino Magazine, which folded earlier this year, fetches prices across eBay well above the original news-stand price.  Teen Magazines, which some may argue are one of the lowest forms of magazine value, occupy more than 5,000 listings on eBay including the dead publications, CosmoGirl and Teen Magazine.  The common tactic to dub an issue as a collectors edition now has more relevance [...]

Two recent cover-stories in the weekly news magazines have counter arguments about innovation in the US. Business Week suggests that innovation is declining while Time says it’s booming…

We mentioned the creation of Agency Nil recently. And some of you may have heard of Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s latest effort, where they auctioned the services of 40 of their interns for 3 months, via eBay. The winning bid, by Brammo, if anyone is wondering, was $17,655!
Agency Nil has now challenged CP+B, as well as all the losing bidders of the auction. They will complete a project in the same period of time for half the price, i.e $8,827.50, with a caveat that says that if the person who accepts the deal feels the final output is worth more [...]

In these lean times, eBay is hoping to persuade you to spend some of your hard earned dollars with them by pushing a more sustainable model of shopping they’re marketing as part of their project Green Team, though you might not initially realize it upon visiting their website. Despite the 1,000 plus employees that are helping to make this eco-initiative possible, the invitation to visit the Green Team site is only given a small tab on the upper right hand corner of the eBay home page – hardly a stunning endorsement on the part of the management. Still, once you manage [...]

It may have taken several years, but people have become pretty comfortable with buying and selling items through online auctions.  Sites like eBay, in conjunction with PayPal, have done a nice job of putting participants at ease. While still “buyer beware,” there are satisfaction surveys, customer feedback tools, and conflict resolution processes in place that provide a modicum of comfort when entering into a faceless transaction.
Yet, a certain amount of trepidation still exists when buying and selling expensive items such as cars or luxury goods.  Pictures help to tell part of the story, but the question always lingers, “is that [...]

Trying to find a way to, erm, outbeat foreheadvertising and pregnant-belly advertising, Floyd Hayes of ad agency Cunning New York decided to put his voice up for sale on eBay.