EBay and the Existence of Firms
As a global online auction market, eBay provides people a new way to do online shopping, not only by purchasing a product at a certain price, but also by the unique auction format. Through auction procedure, sellers can earn more than the base price in their mind and buyers can bid the price up to the most they can afford.
By setting up a convenient platform to gather sellers and buyers together, eBay reduces lots of searching costs as other websites expend. However, there are still two major problems which can lead to transaction costs for an unregulated online auction market: Adverse selection and moral hazard. Adverse selection occurs when information asymmetries appear before both sides
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Another feature of eBay is that although they do several advertisements, consumers acquire this website mainly through word of mouth. They have low advertising expenses and high brand awareness mostly because consumers are satisfied with their experience on eBay and would like to share with others. Because of the strong word-of-mouth effect, eBay has now expanded globally and grows rapidly among foreign
However, the goods and services sold on eBay can be considered perfectly competitive. There is a multitude of buyers, or producers, and consumers have options with substitutes. Most of the products sold within their category are similar and for the quality of the product, they are typically within the same price range of one another, and each individual seller chooses their price based on other similar goods sold on the site.
EBay has paved the wave in this industry and being in a billion dollar industry making things happen to benefit consumers in many ways.[5]
Dembosky, A. (2012). Ebay moves beyond its dotcom roots. Available:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/df3723ca-1773-11e2-8cbe-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2EbzDqb5Y. Last accessed 10th Dec 2012
eBay has a choice preferred standpoint. Regularly contributed similar to the world 's greatest store, and have a bigger number of things available to be purchased than anyplace else. However its maintainability props on patch up unstable ground as omnichannel world envision, for arranging purposes, that everything is available to be purchased in each commercial center, each methods, and each channel. Partaking connected shoppers may never get to that world, yet it 's a helpful arranging presumption.
Ebay is primarily service providers who connect the sellers and buyers by providing platform to sell and buy any goods.
The electronic auction websites have a role of providing the mean to the people who want to sell their electronic devices on the websites in order to get the maximum sale price of the product. The role of these auction sites is to reduce the risk of sellers, protect intellectual property rights, support laws and regulations, provide equal opportunity to the sellers and provide the more enjoyable buying and selling experience to the visitors. There should be proper policies for buying and selling electronic items on the auctions websites (Jacobson, 2003- 2015).
Information finds signals when trends in data change and help seller act on those real-time signals to create market opportunities. Making recommendations on what the next in demand ebay collectable will be can be highly profitable for sellers. The most important factor for ebay is the speed at which data can be analyzed and recommendations can be made signal a trend before it is over. Ebay estimates that 1,000 new bidders access the online auction site every day, which means 1,000 new opportunities for sellers to market their products. It becomes increasingly important for sellers to get demand forecasts for their products so that opportunities are not missed. This kind of real-time data sets ebay apart from their competition in the online auction
Ebay a company that made its name for buyers to bid on items of interest and for users to browse through a search engine for a broad market of items online world wide. Ebay-Inc., was founded by a 28-year-old software developer in September 1995 by Pierre Omidyar 's San Jose living room. On eBay one can conduct worldwide person-to-person trading, or sales which could be in the a forms of a garage sales, flea markets,
• This section consists of questions with serial number 1 - 5. • Answer all questions. • Marks are indicated against each question.
1.) Seller is inquiring about the removal order items that she created last Aug. 14 and she still doesn't receive the item.
E-commerce (electronic commerce or EC) is the buying and selling of goods and services, or the transmitting of funds or data, over an electronic network, primarily the Internet. These business transactions occur either business-to-business, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer or consumer-to-business. The terms e-commerceand e-business are often used interchangeably. The term e-tail is also sometimes used in reference to transactional processes around online retail, (SearchCIO, 2015). In other words e-commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services online.
Milgrom and Weber [13] have shown that the English auction dominates all other auction formats in terms of seller 's expected profit, when the comparison is restricted to symmetric equilibria. Myerson [14] and Riley and Samuelson [15] explain that if the buyers are risk neutral and have independently and identically distributed private values, then, for the majority of probability distributions, the seller 's expected profit is maximized making it the optimal bidding strategy. The item is awarded to the buyers with the highest value, and any buyer whose value is lower than an optimally set threshold receives zero expected surplus. These two conditions, however, are satisfied by a large array of trading mechanisms, including each of the standard auctions all with the same seller 's reserve price.
The company eBay Inc. is an American multinational Internet consumer-to-consumer corporation. Founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar in San Jose, California, it is now a multi-billion dollar business with operations localized in over thirty countries including China and India. It’s main enterprise is eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website that allows people and businesses to buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services internationally. Millions of collectibles, décor, appliances, computers, furnishings, equipment, domain names, vehicles, services, intangibles and other miscellaneous items are listed, bought, or sold daily on eBay. Anything can be auctioned on the site as long as it is not illegal and does not violate the eBay’s Prohibited and Restricted Items policy.
Following a 220% increase in profits and 800% increase in revenues over six months, eBay Inc. is considering the following courses of action:
The fact that eBay does have some successful competition means that its strategic capability has become less unique. There is a hint in their competitor profile that innovation and perhaps adaptability to different cultures as they innovate is not core to eBay and something which has been developed more successfully by others working within their own national culture. Indeed, eBay rules in its own territory of North America and in Europe. The search capability of eBay also means that niche players do not really make sense, whereas the consumer trust that comes from being a big player is worth everything when trading on-line, as is the notion that whatever you want it will be on eBay because of its size. Thus, the so-called network effects of eBay (the bigger the company, the more successful it will be) and its first mover advantage that has led to this level are key to its success.