Ebay Buiness Policy and Strategy

Introduction

Pierre Omidyar has established a way to allow an online, community based trading environment that creates an efficient market where everyone is able to have an equal access through the same medium. This common medium that is used to make trades within diversified market segmentations is available through using the internet. The internet also allows internet participants to par-take in either online auctions or online e-tailing.

Since the beginning of the mid-1990s, eBay has dominated the online auction market, using the growing popularity of the internet as a tool for competing. Since then, eBay’s cliental includes over 94.9 million registered users from more than 150 countries. eBay’s auction site of registered users ranged from high school and college students looking to make some extra money, to Fortune 500 companies(e.g., IBM, Dell, or Microsoft) selling excess inventory, to large government agencies like the U.S. Postal Services selling undeliverable packages.

The Online Auction Industry

Auctions have been established throughout history for three main reasons. First, they give sellers a convenient way to find a buyer for something they would like to sell. Second, auctions are a resourceful way for people to collect hard-to-find objects. Finally, auctions are one of the “purest” markets that exist for goods, in that they bring buyers and sellers to contact a mutual price.

Online auctions use the same traditional methods as regular auctions. One of the differences of online auctions from traditional auctions is that the auction traditional practices occur over the internet rather than at a specific geographic location with the buyers and sellers present. The other difference is that there are three basic categories of online auctions. They are business-to-business auctions, business-to-consumer auctions, and person-to-person auctions.

In business-to-business auctions, it usually involves equipment and merchandise. Doing the...