eBay Express Launched

eBay has officially launched eBay Express, a new site aimed at creating an eBay experience that is more like traditional online retailers. eBay Express' big innovation is a shopping cart. I know what you're thinking. Shopping cart? What's the big deal? With eBay's auction model, you can't simply find an item and buy it, you have to participate in an auction (at least for most items). This can take days. Items appearing on eBay Express can be purchased immediately and have known shipping costs, either with fixed shipping costs or calculated shipping which takes your ZIP code into account.

One of the issues with the new site is that there isn't much there. For example, try a search for Ipod Nano 4GB. As of today, you'll get over 3000 results on eBay.com, but only about 38 results on Express. If you're not bargain hunting, that could be a good thing. It certainly narrows your choices.

To a large extent, eBay Express is a Band-Aid on eBay. It takes all of the messy stuff and filters it out, leaving not much behind because, well, eBay is messy. A better solution to the eBay mess is gumshoo.com. gumshoo takes the entire world of eBay and narrows search results down to a targeted list that meet your criteria. You'll find many more options on gumshoo than you will on eBay Express, and you'll find much less junk on gumshoo than you will on eBay.com. And neither eBay nor eBay Express have the anti-fraud auction analysis gumshoo offers.

That said, eBay Express offers users a much simpler shopping experience and I applaud eBay for making the effort to simplify their shopping experience. Let's just hope that its scarcity of items doesn't last long.