Originally Posted by buckfiddious Originally Posted by

Lemme axe a question:



Selling cheap carbon on ebay- is this simply a back-door route around a contract? I was thinking about this last night as I was trying to understand the whole idea. Because the more I think about it, the less sense it makes.



Figure, if you've got a $450 carbon frame to sell, even if you double the price, you've got a market dominating product, just on cost. And that goes for all segments of the bike industry, road, cross, MTB, 29er, Fat, whatever. So why not just sell them on the open market and OWN the entire market? I mean, you're a chinese/taiwanese bike manufacturer. ALL THE PARTS are made right there in your back yard. You could Bikes Direct the whole thing online, cut out the middleman and dominate the market. How many fatties did BD sell? All of them. They sold all the fatties they made.



But this is not what the ebay carbon guys are doing. They're selling frames one at a time on the least efficient marketplace I can think of, one that's charging them a butt-load of fees just for the privilege of using their own proprietary payment system.



We've already established that the chinese frame makers are pretty smart businessmen. So why would they do this? it makes zero sense. Ebay makes zero sense for them. It's an expensive way to sell frames. There's zero chance of promoting your sales or your product.



The only way it makes sense is if you have a non-compete with the people you make the frames for. If you aren't allowed to sell competing frames in the same markets, ebay seems like a way around that.



Seriously, trying to wrap my head around the idea of "we make a top quality product at the best price in the world" and "we only sell it on ebay, a marketplace most known these days as the world's largest flea market..."