eBay can in many ways be credited with introducing many people to the Internet. There are more than 90 million users globally and last year over $60 billion worth of goods were sold on eBay. That represents $2000 a second. But how did this phenomenon begin? A guy called Pierre Omidyar who lived at the time in San Jose, California who had the original idea of using the auction format to sell items online. This was back in September 1995 and the first item he offered for sale was a broken laser pointer. Perhaps surprisingly this sold for $14 and eBay was born. BY 1998 the company had grown to the point were Omidyar and his business partner Jeff Skoll realised the company needed expert management skills that they did not possess. To overcome ethis problem they recruited Meg Whitman, a Harvard Business School graduate who had previously worked for the Stride Rite Corporation and the Walt Disney Company. As us Meg Whitman eBay grew so the competition was forced out of the market place. Big names such as Amazon.com, AOL and Yahoo retired from the fray which left eBay with a moiré or less monopoly of the online auction market. The company spread its wings opening new sites in countries like the UK, Germany and France. This is an expansion that has continued right up till today. During it expansion phase eBay made many acquisitions, some more successful than others. There is little doubt that its best buy was Paypal, the online payment service which now generates almost as much income for the company as its core business, Possibly its most unsuccessful purchase was when it acquired Skype, the Internet phone business which it recently offloaded for a big loss. If eBay had a weakness it was in the amount of effort it put into its customer care service. Even from the early days, forums on the Internet were full of complaints about lack of response to queries and poor handling of complaints. Meg Whitman left the company to pursue a political carer and is currently aiming for the State Governorship of California. The new CEO John Donahoe seems to be leading the company away from online auctions and more towards normal online retail sales. How well this policy will work is difficult to forecast and there is no doubt that the companies attempt to attract the big retailers is alienating their core of individual and small business sellers. The next few years could prove interesting in the history of the first online auction company.
Article Source: http://www.articlecontentprovider.com/articlesubmit
eBay can in many ways be credited with introducing many people to the Internet. There are more than 90 million users globally and last year over $60 billion worth of goods were sold on eBay. That represents $2000 a second. But how did this phenomenon begin?
Wherever you are in the world to learn how eBay is changing and how you can build a profitable
Please Rate this Article
5 out of 5 4 out of 5 3 out of 5 2 out of 5 1 out of 5
