Don’t get outbid, get Skyped!

by Chris Dawson

This post was written in August 2007; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

When Auctionbytes announced eBay alerts on Skype I just had to test it out! Instant message alerts if I’m outbid or an item I’m watching is about to end - perfect!

It’s not as simple as it sounds though - firstly you need the latest version (3.1 or above) of Skype. The tricky part for eBay.co.uk users is working out how to sign up for the alerts. The US announcement says you can sign up in your My eBay Preferences, well you can, but not on the UK site. If you want to sign up you’ll need to log into eBay.com to add Skype as an option.

Skype Alert

Having set your preferences I’m pleased to report that Skype notifications work perfectly well with items your watching or bidding on in the UK. Within minutes an item I’d already got on my watched list prompted a popup in Skype as time counted down into the final fifteen minutes.

One word of warning though, once you sign up for Skype IM notifications on eBay.com you’ll need to edit your preferences on the .com site in the future. The UK site now throws up the following warning when I go to re-edit them.

Skype IM not available on eBay.co.uk

I guess I should have waited until Skype notifications were announced for the UK :-p

Tags for this post: , ,
Author: Chris Dawson
Posted at: Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Filed Under Uncategorized
 

Comments

3 Responses to “Don’t get outbid, get Skyped!”

  1. And now, Skype for ASQ… maybe : TameBay on August 7th, 2007 11:57 am

    [...] « Don’t get outbid, get Skyped! [...]

  2. Eddie on August 8th, 2007 7:25 am

    Wonder why the ‘idea’ came from ?

    We tried to do this with AuctionTrax - it has the functionality to send customised email reminders for ‘about to end’ and we wanted to include SMS notifications, but was too expensive to implement.

    So we went down the Skype route, and got the OK from Trust and Safety to send a clickable link via Skype to notify and bid from, we could only do the ‘link thing’ as there was no API interface to create the Skype Alert window as seen above.

    We didn’t implement it in the end, as it looked messy and was rather a long url to display as a Skype ‘chat’ thing.

  3. eBay writes $900m off Skype : TameBay on October 2nd, 2007 9:26 pm

    [...] The news was obviously a relief to the markets, as eBay’s share price hit an 18 month high. But how will this affect eBay’s users? When eBay bought Skype, the promise was that VoIP telephony would revolutionise communication between buyers and sellers. That hasn’t happened: it’s only in the last few months that “Skype me” buttons have been permitted on eBay listings and that eBay notifications for bidders could be received on Skype. It’s almost as if eBay’s senior managament don’t trust eBayers to talk to each other in case they cut eBay themselves out of the deals. They really need to embrace the technology they spent so much on, or the rest of their $2.6billion investment will be wasted too. [...]

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