Top third-party Amazon sellers compete like stock traders Just beneath the placid surface of a typical product page on Amazon lies an unseen world, a system where third-party vendors can sell products alongside Amazon’s own goods. It’s like a stock market, complete with day traders, code-slinging quants, artificial-intelligence algorithms and, yes, flash crashes. (Wall Street Journal)
I've speculated that technology will one day enable all online-vendors to function on a bid/ask market, I think that'd be swell. I wonder, though, how second-hand eBay goods could make it onto such a system; probably would have to have some standardized quality-checks, or at least some sort of self-managing market check.