Ebay Case Analysis

eBay is currently the top-ranked online auction company within its industry, with nearly one-third of U.S. internet users registered on its site. The mission of eBay “is to provide a global trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything.” Millions of people buy and sell items on eBay every day, and because eBay is a for profit company, it gets a cut of the profit from each sale for itself. There are several objectives that eBay strives to meet on a daily basis. First is to be a place where people can buy and sell things. It does this through a website where sellers can list their items and with either a simple search or navigation through categories, buyers can find those items. EBay wants to be a place where people can find almost any type of item imaginable, and it achieves this through the ease of use and global availability. It wants the service to be free for buyers and cheap for sellers. By only charging the sellers, it makes sure that buyers don’t have to worry about accidental charges from shopping there and sellers learn not to over-list and abuse the system. EBay is also good for the environment in that many things that would have otherwise ended up in landfills instead end up in a new home. It lowers the barriers of trade due it’s to ease of use. It also does not feel very artificial in that a lot of the things you need to worry about in real world transactions also apply to eBay such as the integrity of the sellers/buyers. There are two main issues faced by eBay that it is trying to address. The first and most obvious of which is competition. Just like practically every industry, there are other players that want a slice of that market. These competitors include Amazon.com, Yahoo! Inc., Google, and Craigslist. The second issue has to do with the perception of risk in purchasing from online auctions. Because, for the most part, all the sellers are unknown to the buyers, they cannot be completely sure that the