2. History
This company was founded in 1995 in San
Jose, CA by Iranian-American computer programmer
Pierre Omidyar. It was originally called AuctionWeb.
In 1997, the company was renamed to Ebay and
received $6.7 million in funding from Benchmark
Capital. In March 1998, Ebay had 30 employees, half
a million users and revenues of $4.7 million in the US.
By early 2008, the company was worldwide, had
hundreds of millions of registered users, 15,000+
employees, and revenues of almost $7.7 billion.
3. Structure of the Company
Ebay is a consumer-to-comsumer company,
meaning consumers facilitate transactions and sell
things to other consumers. It is a decentralized
network where users/nodes are able to join or leave
at any time they would like. Users also
communicate/interact with each other on this website.
5. Complementary Products/Services -
Competitors
Amazon allows users to purchase items, like Ebay.
However, Amazon doesn’t offer these products through
auctions. Ebay offers it’s “buy it now” option, which is similar
to Amazon. In a way, I think Ebay has an upper hand because
you can purchase and bid on things, whereas, Amazon only
allows people to purchase. Also, another similar service is
how each site makes suggestions to users for things they
might like based on searches and/or recent purchases.
Amazon and Ebay both allow customers to rate sellers. Ebay
also allows sellers to rate buyers, which allows sellers to
know if this buyer is legitimate.
Overstock.com is similar to both of these sites, in that
it also allows consumers to purchase items. Although this site
doesn’t allow you to bid on items either.
6. Partners
O Pay Pal
O Ebay has acquired
companies like
Craigslist, Skype,
and a German
website called
brands4friends
7. Complementary Products/Services -
Partners
Craigslist is very similar to Ebay, in
that it allows consumers to sell things to
each other. It doesn’t do it through auctions,
but rather through classified ads, meaning
the ads are organized into categories where
you can look for what you want.
8. User Base
O As of June 30, 2012, eBay had 104.8
million active users according to their
latest financial report.
10. Collaborate, Coordinate, &
Compete
Ebay collaborates with Paypal. This allows them to give
users an easier way to pay for the products that they purchase on
the website and helps protect their customer’s information when
making purchases. This makes people feel more comfortable
because there is so much fraud and identity theft present in
today’s society.
Ebay coordinates with sellers to allow them to use their
website to sell/buy things. Sellers can create their “store” to sell
their products to people. Some people make stores that sell like
items, for example, DVDs. Other people sell random items that
they are trying to get rid of
Ebay competes by making changes and offering things
that competitors don’t. Like mentioned before, Ebay allows
customers to buy things via an auction, which none of their
competitors offer. Sometimes when utilizing these auctions you
can get things cheaper than purchasing it in a store or from one of
the competitors, which will help attract people.
11. Assets/Tools
O Sellers rate buyers and vice versa. This helps
people feel like they can trust the people they buy
from.
O When you go back to their homepage it gives you
items that are similar to what you have previously
searched for.
O An asset is pay pal because it ensures safe
purchasing and makes people feel safe when
using their cards to buy things. This is a huge
asset because without this it could hurt their
business. With so much identity theft today, who
would want a stranger having their credit card
information.
O They offer global shipping, which helps anyone
access the items.
12. Funding
O The only information that I could find on
funding for Ebay was that the company
received $6.7 Million in funding from
Benchmark Capital in 1997.
13. Revenue
Ebay has several ways of generating
revenue. They use broker fees. Ebay charges a
listing fee and then also charges for selling the
item once it is sold. As of November 2012, they
take $0.10 to $2 (based on the opening price)
for the listing and 9% of the sale. An interesting
way they are able to earn more revenue is by
getting more people to use pay pal because
according to Wikipedia, when someone who
initially set up their pay pal account through
ebay uses their pay pal for a non-Ebay
transaction, Ebay earns offsite revenue.
14. Intellectual Property
Ebay has a statement on their
website stating that they work very hard to
protect intellectual property. They don’t allow
people to use intellectual property, such as
copyrighted material, in an unlawful way.
The Ebay name and logo are registered
trademarks in the US and internationally.
They don’t allow the sale, register, or use of
the domain names.
15. Distribution
Ebay distributes consumer-to-
consumer, which means consumers sell and
distribute to other consumers. Also, I can
see that they distribute through long tails
because they offer a large number unique
items, but sells relatively small quantities of
them.
16. Personalized and Customized
Results
Ebay offers customized and personal
results on their site. When you search for
items on the site they save what you have
searched for and when you return to the site
the homepage offers related items that you
may like.
17. Works Cited
O “Ebay”. Wikipedia. Web. 18 June 2013.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay#Profit_
and_transactions>
O “Ebay inc”. Yahoo. Web. 18 June 2013.
<http://finance.yahoo.com/q/co?s=EBAY>
