An example of an E-commerce success and its causes--- eBay

eBay is a global online marketplace where practically anyone can trade practically anything. Launched in 1995, eBay started as a place to trade collectibles and hard-to-find items.

eBay founded in Pierre Omidyar's San Jose, a computer programmer, wrote the code for an auction website that he ran from his home computer in September 1995. It was from start meant to be a marketplace for the sale of goods and services for individuals.

Today, eBay is the world's largest online community of buyers and sellers. With a global presence in 38 markets, including the US, and over 241 million registered users worldwide, eBay offers boundless opportunity to come together in one Internet site and be able to buy and trade a wide range of items, including fine collectibles. It allows people pursue their interests and their passions in the areas of their hobbies and their collectibles.

eBay has built an online person-to-person trading community on the Internet, using the World Wide Web. Buyers and sellers are brought together in a manner where sellers are permitted to list items for sale, buyers to bid on items of interest and all eBay users to browse through listed items in a fully automated way. The items are arranged by topics, where each type of auction has its own category. It's convenient and easy to be found by people.

eBay has both streamlined and globalized traditional person-to-person trading, which has traditionally been conducted through such forms as garage sales, collectibles shows, flea markets and more, with their web interface. This facilitates easy exploration for buyers and enables the sellers to immediately list an item for sale within minutes of registering.



eBay has done a regular basis to promote eBay, they have had isolated campaigns through radio and print, and they've also done some tradeoffs and some banner ads on other sites. But the really unique thing about eBay is that when compare theirs to traditional businesses or other e-commerce sites, they have done very little external promotion to build membership.

eBay is such a unique community that they've been able to build their membership through the word-of-mouth of their users and they've also attracted new members due to the amount of media attention that has come to the site in the past few years.

Another cause has helped to make eBay as successful as it has been, is that people really enjoy the experience of the shopping bazaar. They enjoy looking around for merchandise. The other component is they really enjoy the competition of the bidding process. Everybody likes to get a bargain, and in some way, shape or form, likes to haggle a little bit over the price. eBay's auction format allows users to do that.

Obviously, people are becoming more and more comfortable with shopping online and they're getting more and more accustomed to doing that. That's another factor why eBay is grateful.

Related links:
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~magnus/ief248a/eBay/history.html
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/2127.html
http://news.ebay.com/about.cfm

Posted by Moo Hui Sin