EBay

Rajesh Links to some ebay articles and blog posts. Ebay has always fascinated me because it is one of the successful business models on the Internet and it is based on a simple fact that "making ineffcient markets efficient" is money making.

Robert Scoble talkd to an eBay exeuctive on a flight and gathered this info:


# $7 to $8 billion runs through the eBay platform (yes, he called eBay a "platform") every quarter.

# Every hour eBay registers 3000 to 4000 new users.

# This year they are expecting somewhere around $3.5 billion in revenues. That's above expectations.

# Every day about a terabyte of data courses through eBay's data centers (most of the machines running eBay are running Windows, he told me. The back end they use is running on Sun Microsystems computers).

# eBay has a high degree of customer lockin. How? Well, for one, many of their customers are getting rich (he says he knows a few power sellers who have already retired). Second, the more you buy and sell on eBay, the better your ratings, and those aren't transferable to other auction systems.

Bill Miller on Ebay :

What is eBay's business? If it is an auction site where individuals, mostly, sell unwanted items — sort of like an Internet enabled flea market — then it probably is fully priced. That is not how the company describes its business, though. Here is eBay's description of what it does: "We make inefficient markets efficient." For those who can size markets, that is all you need to know, if you believe it.