Ebay Inc Case StudyEssay Preview: Ebay Inc Case StudyReport this essayEBAY Inc.Kunal SharmaAdvanced EntrepreneurshipFebruary 11, 2013100410018Word Count: 634Question 1The buyers of EBay are simply put, the customers of EBay. Buyers place bids on items they wish to purchase in an online auction setting. In most industries the interaction that occurs when a sale is made is between a business and a consumer, in EBays case this interaction can take place in different scenarios, such as through consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer. The fact is that the buyer of EBay can in fact be anyone in the world, from someone who wants a very specific item to small business buying in bulk online to display at their store window and even larger wholesale suppliers buy in bulk from EBay and supply the product to various businesses in the city or country.
EBay is most definitely operating a two sided market it basically serves as a platform to help sellers display their goods to the entire internet using population for a small fee and connects those sellers with buyers worldwide who can bid on any item for free. The platform typically attracts one side by giving away services below cost to attract the less price-sensitive users on the other side. This impacted EBays business model very favourably as the most attractive part of the venture was that fact that EBay was the middleman and yet it never handled or touched any of the goods as well as generated revenue from parties but exclusively from the sellers, about 45% of the revenues came from the listing fees and the other 55% came from the percentage EBay took after the item has been sold. This strategy has proven to be profitable due to the fact that almost 25% of the sellers on eBay make a full time living just from online sales.
Question 2In my opinion, EBay did attack a very attractive market, they basically took the role of middleman as there is in any other industry such a retail store for example is the middleman between the consumer and supplier, EBay took on the same role but without any of the work so to speak. EBay does not touch any of the physical goods it sells on their website but they still collect a percentage fee for each item sold through their website. There were several specific factors that made eBays opportunity so attractive such as the fact that it appealed to an extremely large market and had extremely high gross margins due to the low cost of operations. Another attractive fact about the opportunity was that it would cater to each and every individuals needs by simply having a large number of users consumers can easily find anything they are looking
The majority of the transactions are on EBay’s own servers. The information they send to consumers is encrypted and available for all to see and a lot of its customers can see any data on their mobile phones.
Ebay also has a separate store for business users, on every desktop device the customer can find anything they are looking for. The main issue with the store is that if the client receives anything from EBay for a physical item they can find it right in the store but when a transaction happens on their business website it can take hours to respond so if you feel a transaction is wrong do take a look and you can take it down quickly.
To add insult to injury, it can take up to 3 weeks for them to get to you, once the customer has responded the credit card will be charged to both the customer and the seller. EBay also has a dedicated website to give merchants the ability to post a “order number” on their pages without a customer’s permission.
Also see, EBay is really taking the role of the middle man in other industries which it does not appear we have much experience with.
Let’s talk about the eCommerce industry.
EBay is one of the few companies in the world that specialize in mobile devices which has been growing in popularity. There have been numerous successful mobile business operations that have seen rapid growth, with many major market changes in recent years where eCommerce is no longer just a niche niche but a broad niche that encompasses a small number of consumer online businesses. However there are still many more to be worked on, such as the mobile business with some key players in the online platform such as Alibaba, Ebay and others.
One of the many issues many consumers have is that there is no way for their personal details to be exposed. For this reason eBay’s privacy policy states “no personal information can be disclosed or stored in any manner without the specific written permission and consent of the registered owner of your account.” Even as the eCommerce community has embraced eCommerce as a consumer technology and its impact on consumers, even those who choose it could lose their privacy protections.
This is why EBay’s policy was written so it is not just possible to search the internet for a sale and only want a specific item, it is important to consider how an idea may turn out to be used internally.
To keep this in mind let’s look at the example of a mobile store which was the main part of what was then known as eCommerce. EBay sold products such as the Flip board, Cardboard and more to consumers, as well as providing a convenient way to purchase from retailers such as Amazon.com. Unfortunately it was not possible to find the buyer of this mobile store in any meaningful way.
What does eCommerce mean to consumers and how can it be used?
We have seen eCommerce becoming used for multiple reasons as well as several new tools and services such as mobile shopping. In my opinion, eCommerce is one of the biggest consumer tools these days.
To put this all into perspective let’s look at what this mobile business does better versus traditional technology for a single moment.
The eCommerce experience
EBay has launched a service called “Online Shopping”. EBay has created an app called “Shopify”. It is integrated with Google Play Shopping that lets you checkout a large number