Future Of E-Bay Essay, Research Paper
Individuals are unable to produce every single thing they need in order to survive, therefore, for centuries they have been exchanging among each other. In the past, market place was a common location to meet at least once a week and trade. People replaced their belongings, starting from food and ending with clothes and pots. Over the time, the trading experiences had changed extremely. Not only we are buying and selling different things, but also we are using a completely different bazaar. EBay is a new kind of market place created a few years ago, which still tries to grow and attract more customers.
Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll found e-Bay in September of 1995. The two men started it after a conversation between Omidyar and his girlfriend, a Pez collector (The Industry Standard, p.2). At the beginning it was a very small business that had only few employees. Thank to Meg Whitman, hired in 1997, e-Bay expanded enormously. Today, e-Bay is one of the world s leading online trading communities. According to The In-dustry Standard , e-Bay community has nineteen million registered users and the number is still growing.
To attract more customers, the company has local sites in 53 markets in the U.S. It allows people to trade features in close neighborhoods and makes quick exchange real-istic. E-Bay is also known abroad. It has branches in many countries, such as: Japan, Canada, Italy, Germany, France and Australia. Foreigners are interested in becoming e-Bay users for the reason that they can go thru a process of exchange using their own lan-guage. This is very important because trading requires good communication among buy-ers and sellers. It would be impossible to make deals with individuals who cannot under-stand us.
People always have high demands and they usually look for good quality items for a reasonable price. E-Bay catches their attention by helping people trade practically anything on earth (e-Bay s Web site). According to Meg Whitman, the CEO and presi-dent of e-Bay, e-Bay users buy and sell items in more than 4500 categories . That s why the category of e-Bay users ranges from unique item seekers to hobbyists and collec-tors. Each of them will always find his or her product of interest varying from exclusive pieces of art to computers and furniture.
The secret to e-Bay expans
E-Bay has its own community, which is made up of individuals who come to the site to do more than just buy or sell they have fun, shop around, and get to know each other, for example by chatting at e-Bays Caf (Asiaweek, p.2). The community is self-policing and users regularly exchange information about their experiences on e-Bay. This virtual market place became a part of life for some members, because they treat e-Bay as their second job. According to e-Bay, the sense of community is alive and offline. In the past few months, e-Bay users have planned vacations together, chipped in and bought a special item for another user, and have even spent vacation time doing home repairs for a fellow user .
The e-Bay s number of members is very large, but Meg Whitman would like to grow this village into a city (Meg Whitman). To accomplish her vision she has to keep e-Bay expanding overseas, attract big businesses and government. E-Bay recently signed a deal with the Walt Disney Internet Group to auction Disney memorabilia on the e-Bay site (The Industry Standard, p.3). The company is also moving into the fix-price arena by acquiring the Half.com. To make the trading more convenient e-Bay induced a Billpoint. It is an online bill payment service that facilitates credit card payment option between buyers and sellers.
In conclusion, I would like to say that e-Bay is a very good site that can be useful to every one of us. To keep it growing Meg Whitman has to find good employees, mis-sionaries not masonries , that will work hard and have the same vision as she has. There is long way to go, but if it work out e-Bay will be a first global village.
Bibliography
Couzin, J. When the Novelty Wears Off, The Industry Standard 11/20/2000.
http://www.ebay.com
The Buying of Selling, Asiaweek 10/24/200.
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