An example of an E-commerce success and its causes

Sunday, June 21, 2009

E-commerce success story: eBay
Now, the conduct of business transaction over the Internet is becoming the dominant force in business and society. Many people decide to online shopping and trading because internet provides high speed communication, ubiquitous access to information. eBay is the world’s largest online trading community which seems to have been a success.





eBay.com is an online auction and shopping web site that allows people buy and sell products or services worldwide. This site offers users an opportunity to come together and allows buying and selling a wide range of items including fine collectibles. A gross merchandise sale is the key factor in determining success in Internet space. eBay.com doing $8 million (US$) a day in gross merchandise sales which quite lead over the other competitors such as Amazon.com auctions do about $300,000 a day in gross merchandise sales and Yahoo!’s auctions are somewhere in the neighborhood of $480,000 a day. Besides, according to a Compete.com study, the eBay.com attracted at least 902 million visitors annually by 2008.

Why eBay can be successful to be the world’s largest online trading community?
I found out that eBay continues to develop new ideas, new programs, new services which lead eBay to be attractive and safety online trading location.

From time to time, some people are coming to the site to list items that are in direct violation of user agreement such as the couple in Chicago that were going to put their baby up for auction and the person who put a human kidney up for auction. eBay were investigated the listing and able to find those individuals, suspend their accounts, suspend them from eBay and remove the items from the auction site. Well, in order to reduce those infrequent occurrences to much greater extent, eBay require all new users to eBay, who are going to sell items, to provide eBay with credit card. This not only discourage people from coming to the site to engage in fraud or listing pranks, but also allows eBay has a credit card to assist them in working with the law enforcement community. Thus, eBay was creating a trust and safety trading environment which the great majority of people who are selling on eBay are really warm, decent, trustworthy and honest people.

Besides, more and more traditional brick-and-mortar types of businesses making entryways into the Internet space. Those people feel that eBay was so enticing, fun and in many ways profitable that they created a brand new business for themselves on eBay. eBay will also help users create own web site on eBay. This let users feel that there is an investment required to participate and accountability.

In addition, eBay will continue provide new services to achieve user’s needs. For examples, eBay purchased Butterfield & Butterfield which now called eBay Great Collections that designed to bring higher valued items to the site. Besides, they also purchased a company called Cruise International Auctioneers and created an automobile site on their site which allows people to list automobiles in a separate category, and it also creates a site where collector automobiles can be auctioned off on eBay. The idea for those two purchases are came from their user community because users were sending signals to eBay that they were interested in listing additional higher priced items