User:Nolanevanmatt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

[edit] Ebay

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload

[edit] The History of Ebay

Ebay was founded in San Jose , California, September 3rd, 1995. It was founded by a French computer programmer named Pierre Omidyar. At this time it was part of a personal website called AuctionWeb. He spent a lot of his time writing the code for ebay over a Labor Day weekend, and created the basis of what we know today. The first item ever sold on Ebay was a broken laser pointer. It sold for 14.83. This item was posted as a test by Pierre to see how a marketplace would be affected by open resources and equal access on the web. He was very suprised to see that it actually sold. He contacted the person that bought the laserpointer and told him that it was broken and the buyer told him that he was a collecter of broken laser pointers. Omidyar knew that his site could be something very big because he realized people will purchase just about anything. He wanted to base his company on the fact that everyone had something to contribute and that people could be trusted with this. By June Omidyar had recieved a revenue of about $10,000 and hired the company's first employee Chris Agarpao. Jeffrey Skoll was then hired as the first president and Omidyar went to work on Ebay fulltime. In 1997 Ebay hosted more than 200,000 auctions per month and there were about 41 employees and 341,000 users. In the next year there were about 2.1 million users and 138 employees. Ebay was growing very fast. This was also the year in which The Ebay Foundation was created to give money to charities. Ebay had a gross merchandise volume of $740 million. In 1999 there were about 640 employees and over 10 million users. Also ebay expanded to the UK and other countries in this year. Ebay continued to expand and grow rapidly in the next few years as in 2000 they reached countries such as Austria, France and Canada and was named the #1 ecommerce site. 2001 led to expansion in Italy, New Zealand and Singapore. In 2002 the company acquired Paypal. Ebay continued to grow and acquire many new projects in the next few years. During this growth they acquired Skype, sites like Stubhub.com, Ebay Express, Rent.com and Shopping.com. By the end of last year Ebay consisted of 222 million users, 133 million paypal accounts, and over 13,000 employees. The total payments reached $32 billion. Ebay still continues to expand and grow.


Sources:
http://news.ebay.com/history.cfm
http://www.happynews.com/living/online/history-ebay.htm

[edit] What They Do

According to their own website, " eBay brings together millions of people every day on a local, national and international basis through an array of websites that focus on commerce, payments and communications."

eBay is an online marketplace that allows anyone and everyone to buy and sell pretty much anything online to other users. Anyone can use it by creating an account and listing items of all sorts for sales. Other users bid on the items and the highest bidder wins. Millions of items are sold and shipped all over the world every day. The products on this site are aimed at every age group from young children to adults. There is something for everyone on eBay

eBay offers many other companion sites that cover almost anything you could think of online. These sites are smaller shopping sites that go along with the major marketplace.
Rent.com- Lists apartments and houses for sale on an online marketplace.
Half.com-Preowned, used and new products of all kinds at very low prices. Often half off.
Kijiji.com-A site to buy & sell new or used items, look for classified ads, and meet local people for free.
Paypal.com-A site to pay and get paid for items sold on the internet. Users can pay with credit cards, bank accounts, buyer credit or account balances in a secure environment.
Prostores.com-A website for smaller busineses to sell goods and services online and makes it easy for them to manage their business.
Shopping.com-A site with products from various trusted stores from all over the web that is quickly growing and offers many ways to search and shop.



It also provides many was to pay through credit cards or Paypal accounts etc. and is a way for users to communicate with each other while selling their products.


[edit] Marketing and Sales

A representative from Ebay admitted that most of the strange auctions that make the news were posted by a secret marketing department within the company and not by regular Ebay users. The secret marketing group inside Ebay, made up mostly of recently graduated philosophy majors, creates the auctions from a bunker under a nondescript cement block building in Omaha.

"We feel it's an effective way to get our name in front of the consumer," said Mark Childs from Ebay's public relations department.
"These silly auctions don't harm anyone. Well, except for that one baby auction we forgot to take down in time, but that's an exception."

[edit] Competitors

Amazon.com - Amazon.com started as an online bookstore but soon diversified its product lines by adding VHS's, DVD's, music CD's, MP3's, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, food, furniture, toys and more.

Google - Most of Google's revenue is derived from advertising programs as well as providing a search engine, web-based e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking and video sharing. But this isn't all they do, Google is planning to expand beyond their normal web services. Google has made a small announcement on their blog saying that they are going to start allowing certain parties to sell items through Google Base, which people can buy using credit cards linked to their Google Account. According to another blog post, Google already accepts payments in this fashion for Google Video, Google Earth, Google Store, etc.

Yahoo! - Yahoo provides a range of products and services including a Web portal, a search engine, The Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news and posting.

[edit] The Future of Ebay

The future of Ebay is coming faster every day, they have many things they are touching up on with many new advancements to the site, how the company is running, what and how Ebay will sell on Ebay. Ebay is has realized that they can't just do used actions for the people, so they are going to be selling items on there site like Amazon. They are slowly merging into both, along with putting out four test sites for Ebay Motors which is already a 14 billion dollar business. Ebay has recently bought out Half.com which was kind of the little sister company of Ebay. Half.com sold a lot of the whole sale items that where not used by someone already. They have been doing well and recently Ebay made the move to take over Half.com and run just the way they want too. Advancements on the site, a little upgrading? Skype has big plans for the future, they are planning on selling various things from ringtones and avatars to allowing you to build a PayPal/Skype wallet and be able to buy take out down the street with your PayPal/Skype online wallet. No one knows if Ebay will complete everything they have said, Ebay being a company that hasn't made statements of growth like this before but we will just have to wait and see what does and doesn't happen.

[edit] Blah

My thoughts on Ebay 10 years from now is that they will be slowing down and leveling out, they are going to become more like an Amazon type site with a lot more whole sale but still continue to keep the auctions going strong. The site would be nothing without them but now that they have become so large scale they are going to get involved in more whole sale items with no no bidding.