I just read Seth Godin’s blog about “Thinking Outside the (eBay) Search Box”, which led to an introduction of Squidoo’s new auction supplementing tool, SquidBids.

The logic behind Seth’s post, however, eluded me - because he seems to be saying mere ‘Search’ traffic from eBay won’t work well, and outlines an alternative based on building relationships with prospects that in time translates into more sales made more easily at higher price points.

Seth Godin: “What about the hundreds of thousands of people that just want to sell typical stuff and don’t have great copywriting talent? They need a different strategy.”

In other words, the blog post outlines the smart, logical, ideal way ANY online business should be developed.

Then why the typical or conventional eBay model? And how does eBay work better for the half-million people who work on it full-time?

Sheer numbers.

Imagine getting 0.001% of the insane traffic that eBay receives daily to view your ad. Chances are something will stick. Especially if you target a niche.

The eBay model based on this rationale avoids doing much else but repeat listings in a niche, finding hot selling items, sourcing them cheap, and moving quantities enough to turn a profit.

No ‘marketing’ of any sort involved there - no list building, relationship building, funnel building, or anything. Just slipstream onto the massive traffic of potential buyers who flock to eBay.

That approach does indeed suit a certain demographic. Sure, it’s not the easiest, most profitable or even most efficient method - but it’s one that works for a particular group of people.

Just as the Adsense based VRE model does.

Or to take an extreme (and not in any way related) example, just as email spam does.

These are people who are debunking Seth’s assertion that “average stuff for average people is no way to make a living”.

SquidBids won’t impact that audience in any major way. At least, that’s my guess.

Just like Adsense driven models ignore list building or affiliate marketing or developing and selling a product in the same niche. These are not-too-complex things folks using this model too can do and easily boost income from the same traffic they already receive… but many CHOOSE not to, for a variety of reasons.

So whom WILL SquidBids help?

I’m really not sure. The target audience seems to be one that’s already ‘marketing savvy’ - and they are already using Squidoo to great effect.

And for the rest who simply want to ’sell on eBay’… are they really going to take the time and effort to set up and integrate “a blog, a twitter following, a FaceBook social graph, and even a SquidBids page” into their process?

What do you think?