UnWired Buyer (eBay)

Digium helps UnWired Buyer deliver killer eBay App

When Mark Spencer began writing code in his Auburn University dorm room, he had an idea that it could be the disruptive technology that could change the telecommunications industry. The open source telephone system called Asterisk, blossomed thanks to a worldwide army of developers that continue to improve the telephony platform. Spencer founded Digium, to help maintain Asterisk and help the world leverage the amazing flexibility, implementation and low cost of the environment. Digium's efforts are having a huge impact for small to mid sized businesses who can now afford to custom-design full featured phone systems. Surprisingly to Spencer, they are also having a major impact in the consumer marketplace.

One example of that is found on the popular auction site eBay. UnWired Buyer used Asterisk to design an application for eBay that is increasing the bid numbers for sellers and enabling buyers to purchase precious wanted items. Grand prize winner of the eBay Developer Challenge 2006 was awarded to UnWired Buyer for the most killer and lucrative application. The application is extending the eBay platform beyond the PC by allowing users to track and bid on auction-style listings from their mobile phones. Three minutes before the end of a selected auction, UnWired Buyer places a call to the user. The user is provided with dynamically updated status on an item, including real-time changes in price status. UnWired Buyer users can place new bids or increase previous bids instantly using simple touch-tone commands. UnWired Buyer allows users to participate in the exciting last minute action until the listing closes. To use UnWired Buyer, all you need is a phone that can receive calls and a North American phone number (as of now).

"We wasted some time looking at other popular commercial providers, but none of them could really solve the problem. Time and delivery were impossible, and they would never be able to compete with the development perspective," said Eric Smith, president and CTO of UnWired Buyer. "Asterisk would do what we need it to and anything it didn't, it can be made to do."

Digium developed a different interface to Asterisk that provided the feature set needed to make the UnWired Buyer vision fly and fly right away. Because of the nature of the platform and the ability to make modifications themselves, developing applications in Asterisk eliminated their barrier to entry. Closed source platforms were far too restrictive.

"Asterisk didn't do what we needed it to do at the time that we started, so we called up Digium and in a few days we had a prototype of the interface that we wanted to interact with and shortly thereafter we had our own Asterisk interface," added Smith. "You can't do that with a commercial PBX platform. Digium and Asterisk helped us go from a basic concept to an initial 1.0 delivery in just four months."

In order to sign up for the UnWired Buyer free service, all you need to do is go to www.unwiredbuyer.com and, sign up and provide your eBay credentials.

UnWired Buyer automatically synchronizes with your watch list on eBay. Theoretically sellers should promote UnWired Buyer to buyers. There are hundreds of buyers for every seller, and increasing the number of bidders will obviously result in higher bids. Sometimes users forget about auctions, UnWired Buyer helps by sending reminders. About 60% of people end up missing their auction because they forgot about it.

While this application from UnWired Buyer aims to help eBay users win their bids, auction losers are inevitable. Allison Smith, known as "the IVR voice," knows this all too well. An avid eBay user and having recorded the voice prompts for UnWired Buyer, she figured she would try the UnWired Buyer service, herself. A couple months after recording the prompts, she was bidding for, yet another, handbag on eBay. The auction came down to the last couple of minutes; and she received her UnWired Buyer call. She could not help but be aggravated when her own voice on the line told her "Your last bid was $75 and zero cents. However, you are not the highest bidder." She quickly took advantage of the opportunity to increase her bid to $95.75 but was, again, frustrated to hear the same familiar voice, saying, "you have been outbid."

The free application has been a major boon for eBay and the auctioneers that utilize it. The average value of an item at the end of an auction under normal circumstances is in the low 20's (e.g. $24.00). Buyers using Unwired Buyer average ending auction price is in the mid 40's. Their users are bidding on higher ended auctions.

UnWired Buyer is adding in the neighborhood of 20% to the final value of the auctions. Those numbers are normally reflected in the last 3 bids alone. Also, 24% of auctions that our UnWired Buyers participate in had no bids prior to them bidding on the auction. This is significant because auctions that receive no bids automatically qualify for re-listing.

As a member of the eBay affiliate program, every time a buyer uses the UnWired Buyer service to win an auction, they get a commission for facilitating that sale.

UnWired Buyer is working on interoperability with Asterisk and more traditional voice products such as VOIP products, Skype applications and instant messenger, among others.

"I think that Asterisk is one of the types of platforms that have really dropped in," noted Smith. "It may have been built for a small office PBX, but because of the flexibility and what you can do with it, it's morphed into this huge application platform for unwired buyers. Once you have the ability to connect with the customer, anywhere, anytime based on all these types of opportunities then there's new ways of using eBay, new ways of data mining the Internet that would not exist if you presume that users don't have perpetual access to activity."