An example of an E-Commerce success and its causes

eBay is a global online marketplace where practically anyone can trade practically anything. It was founded in Pierre Omidyar's San Jose living room back in September 1995. it was from the start meant to be a marketplace for the sales of goods and services for individuals.

In 1998, Pierre and his cofounder Jeff Skoll brought in Meg Whitmen to sustain the success. Meg had studied at the Harvard Bisiness School and had learned the importance of branding at companies such as Hasbro.

Meg culled her senior staff from companies such as Pepsico and Disney, created an experienced management team with an average of 20 years of business of connecting people, not selling them thing.

eBay has built an online person-to-person trading community on the internet, using the World Wide Web. Buyers and sellers are brough together in a manner where sellers are permitted to list items for sales, buyers to bid on items of interest and all eBay users to browse through listed items in a fully automated way. The items are arranged by topics, where each type of auction has its own category.

eBay has both streamlined and globalized traditional person-to-person trading, which has traditionally been conducted through such forms as garage sales, collectibles shows, flea markets and more, with their web interface. This facilitates easy exploration for buyer and enables the sellers to immediately list an item for sales within minutes of registering.Today, eBay is the world's largest online community of buyers and sellers. With a global presence in 38 markets, including the US, and over 241 million registered users worldwide, eBay offer boundless opportunity to come together in one internet site and be able to buy and trade a wide range of items, including fine collectibles. It allows people pursue their interests and their passions in the areas of their hobbies and their collectibles.

To help eBay move into other markets, Whitman also negotiated the purchase of Kruse International, a Collectible car house, and Alando de AG, the largest online-auction house in Europe. By the end of the third quarter 1999, eBay reported sales of more than $741 million, up from just $195 million the year before. The company had also virtually cornered the online-auction business, accounting for 90 percent of all online-auction sales. Even though its earnings fell short of projections, the company managed to accomplish what many other high-profile Internet companies such as amazon.com could not : eBay made a profit.

eBay has done a regular basis to promote eBay, they have had isolated campaigns through radio and print, and they've also done some tradeoffs and some banner ads on other sites. But the really unique thing about eBay is that when compare theirs to traditional businesses or other e-commerce sites, they have done very little external promotion to build memberships.

Another cause has helped to make eBay as successful as it has been, is that people really enjoy the experience of the shopping bazzaar. They enjoy looking around the merchandise. The other component is they really enjoy the competition of the building process. Everybody likes to get a bargain, and in someway, shape of form, likes to hanggle a little bit over the price, eBay's auction format allows user to do that.

Obviously, people are becoming more and more comfortable with shopping online and they're getting more and more accustomed to doing that. That's another factor why eBay is greateful.