3. eBay Inc. E-bay is a multinational e-commerce corporation headquartered in San Jose,
California that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales
through its website. eBay was founded by “Pierre Omidyar” in 1995, and became a
notable success story of the dot-com bubble. Today, eBay is a multi-billion-dollar
business with operations in about 30 countries. The company manages eBay.com, an
online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a
wide variety of goods and services worldwide. The website is free to use for buyers, but
sellers are charged fees for listing items after a limited number of free listings, and again
when those items are sold.
Introduction
4. 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.
History
5. 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
Structure of the Company
7. 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.
8. Partners
Pay Pal
Ebay has acquired
companies like Craigslist, Skype, and a
German website called brands4friends
9. 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.
10. User Base
As of June 30, 2012, eBay had 104.8 million active users according to
their latest financial report.
12. 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
13. Assets/Tools
•Sellers rate buyers and vice versa. This
helps people feel like they can trust the
people they buy from.
•When you go back to their homepage it
gives you
items that are similar to what you have
previously searched for.
•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.
•They offer global shipping, which helps anyone
access the items.
14. Funding
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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
