operates a marketplace in which anyone, anywhere, can buy or sell practically anything. The Company has developed a web-based marketplace in which a community of buyers and sellers are brought together to browse, buy and sell various items. Through its PayPal service, eBay enables any business or consumer with e-mail to send and receive online payments securely, conveniently and cost-effectively. The Company's marketplace exists as an online trading platform that enables a global community of buyers and sellers to interact and trade with one another. Its platform is a fully automated, topically arranged, intuitive and easy-to-use online service that is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, enabling sellers to list items for sale in either auction or fixed-price formats, buyers to bid for and/or purchase items of interest and all eBay users to browse through listed items from any place in the world at any time. Given this innovative business concept, eBay has become the world's largest person-to-person trading community. However, certain challenges still present themselves to the company in both the near and distant future. .
Like most firms, eBay faces external environments that are highly turbulent, complex, and global in nature "conditions that might make our break certain successes, especially in today's dynamic economy. Demographic features that eBay are concerned with include population size, age, geographic distribution, ethnic mix, as well as income distribution. Despite the Internet being available to users around the world, eBay's successes has been limited to the U.S. region and targeted mainly towards the middle to upper classes. Logically, those with Internet access and items worth selling have a direct correlation with individuals with a computer and money to spend. eBay customers for the most part do not have a particular ethnic mix, which is evident in its ability to allow access to anyone with a computer, regardless of the ethnicity, race, or religion.
