What if the current LOCAL food thing were extended to local ebay buying? You can always find out what's closest to you. eBay is in many ways the greenest big business success story (extending the life of consumer products, getting people to collect and treasure stuff that might have become junk). It's just those delivery miles, esp in the USA.
eBay could introduce a green auction type where the win would go to the highest/nearest bidder (eg the nearest bidder within 10% of the highest bid). I've bought things from classifieds on that basis; there was another buyer in the US but the owner didnt want to ship their pride & joy all that way. And there are already pickup only bids for bulky stuff, why not all stuff?
Or 'we' (ANY VOLUNTEERS?) could just do a buy local on eBay viral campaign. One great thing would be to get eBay listers with green sympathies to include a line in every auction.
Or 'we' (any reclusive dotcom millionaires reading) could do a radically localised version & green version of eBay meets Craigslist. Where delivery cost (a good proxy for distance, if calculated in fuel miles/carbon) discounted bids.
Just thinking aloud mostly. I think its good to play with such examples to explore the principles of green marketing.
5 comments:
John, will you stop posting so much. I can barely read faster than you can type :)
Jeez, this is a slow month. There's 80,000 words of book edit taking my blogging rate right down :J
A google maps mash up would work well with this.
As for Craigslist, they're very strong on local listings and I think would be idealogically aligned with this idea already. I am fairly sure I must know some bloggers who have email addresse for the founder and probably the high ups at e bay (paypal for sure) so if you want i could ask them to bring this post to their attention.
Well if ebay or Paypal are looking. Pull your finger out and do for ebay what Jeff Bezos did for spare server capacity.
This has been up and running since 2007, although not marketed under a "green" banner, it has been well publicised as a money saving method. My site, http://www.localbargainfinder.com will identify the items listed within a chosen distance of any postcode that are available to collect. A geographically restricted pool of bidders tends to lead to lower final prices.
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