eBay is the world's online market place. Founded in 1995, eBay is the leading online market place for the sale of goods and services by a diverse community of individuals and businesses. Today, the eBay community includes 49.7 million registered users, and is the most popular shopping site on the Internet when measured by total user minutes according to Media Metrix.
The eBay Market.
eBay enables trade on a local, national and international basis. It features a variety of international sites, specialty sites, categories, and services that aim to provide users with the necessary tools for efficient online trading in the auction-style and fixed price formats.
In 2000, the eBay community transacted more than $5 billion in annualized gross merchandise sales (value of goods traded on the eBay site).
On any given day, there are millions of items listed on eBay across thousands of categories. People come to eBay to buy and sell all kinds of practical, unique, and interesting items.
Rivalry .
In 2001, there were over 2500 auction sites on the Internet. Some of these sites include: Amazon.com Auctions, Yahoo! Auctions, MSN Auctions, AOL Auctions, Excite Auctions, and UBid. Each of these sites has their pros and cons. eBay's closest competition exists with UBid, Amazon, and Yahoo!. Neither company, however, has a customer base as large as eBay's. Using the Internet to attract buyers and sellers from all over the world has allowed eBay to remain competitive. eBay is still 100 times larger as Amazon and 10 times as large as Yahoo! Both of the sites have grown large enough to make the list of the ten largest auction sites on the Internet, but in the meantime eBay's size has more than doubled (with a continued growth rate of 12% per month).
The two big newcomers (Yahoo! and Amazon) have a lot of similarities to eBay: similar categories of goods, similar fixed-length English auction bidding rules, and similar auction-listing procedures.