e bay

e Bay Inc. (NASDAQ: e bay) is an American Internet company that manages e bay.com, an online auction and shopping website where people and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide. In addition to its original U.S. website, e bay has established localized websites in several other countries. e bay Inc also owns PayPal, Skype, and other businesses.
The online auction web site was founded in San Jose, California on September 3, 1995 by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb, part of a larger personal site that included, among other things, Omidyar's own tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Ebola virus.
The very first item sold on e bay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Astonished, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder and asked if he understood that the laser pointer was broken. In his responding email, the buyer explained: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers." The frequently repeated story that e bay was founded to help Omidyar's fiancee trade PEZ Candy dispensers was fabricated by a public relations manager in 1997 to interest the media. This was revealed in Adam Cohen's 2002 book and confirmed by e bay.
Chris Agarpao was hired as e bay's first employee and Jeff Skoll was hired as the first president of the company in 1996. In November 1996, e bay entered into its first third-party licensing deal, with a company called Electronic Travel Auction to use SmartMarket Technology to sell plane tickets and other travel products. The company officially changed the name of its service from AuctionWeb to e bay in September 1997. Originally, the site belonged to Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar's consulting firm. Omidyar had tried to register the domain name echobay.combut found it already taken by the Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company, so he shortened it to his second choice, e bay.com.
e bay went public in 1998, and both Omidyar and Skoll became instant billionaires. The company purchased PayPal in October 2002.
Millions of collectibles, appliances, computers, furniture, equipment, vehicles, and other miscellaneous items are listed, bought, and sold daily. In 2004, e bay launched its Business & Industrial category, breaking into the industrial surplus business. Some items are rare and valuable, while many others are dusty gizmos that would have been discarded if not for the thousands of eager bidders worldwide. Anything can be sold as long as it is not illegal or does not violate the e bay Prohibited and Restricted Items policy. Services and intangibles can be sold too. Large international companies, such as IBM, sell their newest products and offer services on e bay using competitive auctions and fixed-priced storefronts. Regional searches of the database make shipping slightly faster and cheaper. Separate e bay sites such as e bay US and e bay UK allow the users to trade using the local currency as an additional option to PayPal. Software developers can create applications that integrate with e bay through the e bay API by joining the e bay Developers Program. As of June 2005, there were over 15,000 members in the e bay Developers Program, comprising a broad range of companies creating software applications to support e bay buyers and sellers as well as e bay Affiliates.
Controversy has arisen over certain items put up for bid. For instance, in late 1999 a man offered one of his kidneys for auction on e bay, attempting to profit from the potentially lucrative (and, in the United States, illegal) market for transplantable human organs. On other occasions, people and even entire towns have been listed, often as a joke or to garner free publicity. In general, the company removes auctions that violate its terms of service agreement within a short time after hearing of the auction from an outsider; the company's policy is to not pre-approve transactions. e bay is also an easy place for unscrupulous sellers to market counterfeit merchandise, which can be difficult for novice buyers to distinguish without careful study of the auction description.
e bay's Latin American partner is MercadoLibre.
e bay's rivals include Amazon.com Marketplace and Overstock Auctions.
In April of 2006, e bay opened its new e bay Express site, which is designed to work like a standard Internet shopping site to consumers with United States addresses (e bay Express). Selected e bay items are mirrored on e bay Express where buyers shop using a shopping cart to purchase from multiple sellers. The UK version was launched to e bay members in mid October 2006 (e bay Express UK), and differs from the US version by only offering brand new items from pre-vetted business sellers. The German version was also opened in 2006 (e bay Express Germany).
In June of 2006, e bay added an e bay Community Wiki and e bay Blogs to its Community Content which also includes the Discussion Boards, Groups, Answer Center, Chat Rooms and Reviews & Guides.
e bay has a robust mobile offering, including SMS alerts, a WAP site, and J2ME clients, available in certain markets.
e bay offers several types of auctions.
* Auction-style listings allow the seller to offer one or more items for sale for a specified number of days. The seller can establish a reserve price.
* Fixed Price format allows the seller to offer one or more items for sale at a Buy It Now price. Buyers who agree to pay that price win the auction immediately without submitting a bid.
* Dutch Auctions allow the seller to offer two or more identical items in the same auction. Bidders can bid for any number from one item up to the total number offered.
Bidding
For Auction-style listings, the first bid must be at least the amount of the minimum bid set by the seller. Regardless of the amount the first bidder actually bids, until a second bid is made, e bay will then display the auction's minimum bid as the current high bid. After the first bid is made, each subsequent bid must be equal to at least the current highest bid displayed plus one bidding increment. The bidding increment is established by e bay based on the size of the current highest displayed bid. For example, when the current highest bid is less than or equal to $0.99, the bidding increment is $0.05; when the current highest bid is at least $1.00 but less than or equal to $4.99, the bidding increment is $0.25. Regardless of the amount each subsequent bidder bids, e bay will display the lesser of the bidder's actual bid and the amount equal to the previous highest bidder's actual bid plus one bidding increment. For example, suppose the current second-highest bid is $2.05 and the highest bid is $2.40. e bay will display the highest bid as $2.30, which equals the second-highest bid ($2.05) plus the bidding increment ($0.25). In this case, e bay will require the next bid to be at least $2.55, which equals the highest displayed bid ($2.30) plus one bidding increment ($0.25). The next bid will display as the actual amount bid or $2.65, whichever is less. The figure of $2.65 in this case comes from the then-second-highest actual bid of $2.40 plus the bidding increment of $0.25. The winning bidder pays the bid that e bay displays, not the amount actually bid. Following this example, if the next bidder is the final bidder, and bids $2.55, the winner pays $2.55, even though it is less than the second-highest bid ($2.40) plus one bidding increment ($0.25). However, if the next bidder is the final bidder and bids an arbitrarily large amount, for example $10.00 or even more, the winner pays $2.65, which equals the second-highest bid plus one bidding increment.
For Dutch Auctions, which are auctions of two or more identical items sold in one auction, each bidder enters both a bid and the number of items desired. Until the total number of items desired by all bidders equals the total number of items offered, bidders can bid any amount greater than or equal to the minimum bid. Once the total numbers of items desired by all bidders is greater than or equal to the total number offered, each bidder is required to bid one full bidding increment above the currently-displayed winning bid. All winning bidders pay the same lowest winning bid.
e bay has established detailed rules about bidding, retraction of bids, shill bidding (collusion to drive up the price), and other aspects of bidding. These rules can be viewed on the help pages.
Profit and transactions
The e bay homepage during Transformers promotion.
E bay generates revenue from a number of fees. The e bay fee system is quite complex; there are fees to list a product and fees when the product sells, plus several optional fees, all based on various factors and scales. The U.S.-based e bay.com takes $0.20 to $80 per listing and 5.25% or less of the final price (as of 2007). The UK based e bay.co.uk (e bay.co.uk offices) takes from GBP ?0.15 to a maximum rate of GBP ?3 per 100 for an ordinary listing and from 0.75% to 5.25% of the final price. In addition, e bay now owns the PayPal payment system which has fees of its own.
Under current U.S. law, a state cannot require sellers located outside the state to collect a sales tax, making deals more attractive to buyers. Although state laws require purchasers to pay sales tax to their own states on out-of-state purchases, most people ignore this requirement.[citation needed]
The company's current business strategy includes increasing revenue by increasing international trade within the e bay system. e bay has already expanded to almost two dozen countries including China and India. The only places where expansion failed were Taiwan and Japan, where Yahoo! had a head start.
Acquisitions and investments
* In August 2006, e bay announced international cooperation with Google. Financial details have not been disclosed by either party.
* In February 2007, e bay acquired online ticket marketplace Stubhub for $307 million.
* In May 2007, e bay acquired a minority stake in GittiGidiyor.
* In May 2007, e bay acquired the website StumbleUpon for approximately $75 million. e bay Investor Message
e bay has its share of controversy, ranging from its privacy policy (e bay typically turns over user information to law enforcement without a subpoena)[citation needed] to well-publicized seller fraud. e bay claims that their data shows that less than .01% of all transactions result in a confirmed case of fraud. However, e bay states that their stated fraud statistic both undercounts and overcounts fraud.
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One mechanism e bay uses to combat fraud is its feedback system. After every transaction both the buyer and seller have the option of rating each other. They can give a "positive", "negative", or "neutral" rating and leave a comment no longer than 80 characters. So if a buyer has problems, he or she can rate the seller "negative" and leave a comment such as "never received product".
Weaknesses of the feedback system include:
* Small and large transactions carry the same weight in the feedback summary. It is therefore easy for a dishonest user to initially build up a deceptive positive rating by buying or selling a number of very low value items, such as e-books, recipes, etc., then subsequently switching to fraud.
* A user may be reluctant to leave honest feedback out of fear of negative retaliatory feedback (including "negative" in retaliation for "neutral").
* Users and generators of feedback may have different ideas about what it means. e bay offers virtually no guidelines.
* Feedback and responses to feedback are allotted only 80 characters each. This can prevent users from being able to fully list valid complaints.
* Although e bay protects sellers from getting a negative feedback from a deadbeat buyer when the deadbeat buyer/bidder did not respond to Unpaid Item dispute, they do not offer the same protection for a buyer who gets a deadbeat seller.
e bay acknowledges weaknesses in its feedback system on its own policy pages, noting several of the above points.
When a user feels that a seller or buyer has been dishonest, a dispute can be filed with e bay. An e bay account (whether seller, buyer or both) may be suspended if there are too many complaints against the account holder.
Many complaints have been made about e bay's system of dealing with fraud, leading to its being featured on the British consumer rights television program Watchdog. It is also regularly featured in The Daily Mirror's Consumer Awareness page. The complaints are generally that e bay sometimes fails to respond when a claim is made, and since e bay makes its money on commissions from listings and sales may not be in e bay's interest to take action against large sellers. [citation needed]
Frauds that can be committed by sellers include:
* Receiving payment and not shipping merchandise
* Shipping items other than those described
* Giving a deliberately misleading description
* Knowingly and deliberately shipping faulty merchandise
* Counterfeit or bootleg merchandise
* Knowingly Selling stolen goods
* Inflating total bid amounts by bidding on their own auction with "shill" account(s), either the seller under an alternate account or another person in collusion with the seller. Shill bidding is prohibited by e bay and, in at least one high-profile case involving Kenneth Walton (and his accomplices Kenneth Fetterman and Scott Beach) has been prosecuted by the federal government as criminal fraud.
* Sellers of inexpensive items may benefit from inflating the shipping cost while lowering the starting price for their auctions, because some buyers overlook the shipping cost when calculating the amount they are willing to spend. Since e bay charges their fees based on final sales price without including shipping, this allows sellers to reduce the amount they pay e bay in fees (and also allows buyers to reduce or avoid import fees and sales taxes). This is called "fee avoidance", and is prohibited by e bay policy, as are excessive shipping and handling charges. A danger to the buyer in such cases is that in the event of defective merchandise, the seller may claim to have met his refund obligations by returning only the minimal purchase price and not the shipping costs.
* Sellers sometimes charge fees for use of PayPal as well to cover the fees that PayPal charges them. Although this is officially banned by e bay and PayPal (except in the UK) and is against some local laws as well as violating merchant agreements with Visa, Mastercard and Discover (again, except in the UK), e bay does sometimes police for this and will suspend auctions where the seller requests an additional fee for taking PayPal. Therefore inexperienced users often wind up paying these illegal and unenforceable fees.[citation needed]
* Auction sniping is the process of watching a timed online auction, and placing a winning bid at the last possible moment (often literally seconds before the end of the auction), giving the other bidders no time to outbid the sniper. Some bidders do this manually, and others use online services and software designed for the purpose. While disliked by many e bay users, sniping is not against e bay rules as users are expected to put in their maximum bid from the start and the system will automatically bid up on their behalf.
* Burying shipping charges or undesirable terms in a large amount of text.
Intellectual property in auctions
Holders of intellectual property rights, have claimed that e bay profits from the infringement of intellectual property rights. e bay has responded by creating the Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) program, which provides to rightsholders expedited auction takedowns and private information on e bay users, but has likewise been criticized.
* In June 2004 the jeweler Tiffany & Co. sued e bay claiming that e bay profits from the sale of counterfeit Tiffany products. As of July 2006, a trial date has not been set.
* In September 2005, e bay's privacy practices relating to its VeRO program came under scrutiny when WNDU-TV reported that the Embroidery Software Protection Coalition was accusing United States buyers, identified by e bay, of copyright infringement, and demanding monetary settlements. e bay's privacy policy warns that e bay may disclose personal information on the request of any VeRO rightsholder investigating illegal activity; in comparison, competing service Yahoo! Auctions may disclose personal information in response to a subpoena or court order. Although, according to a University of Notre Dame law professor, there is no legal basis, in the United States, for copyright infringement claims against buyers, e bay's VeRO program may have allowed the ESPC to obtain private information without judicial oversight.
* Some manufacturers have abused e bay's VeRo program, through which copyright and trademark owners can quickly protect their rights, by seeking to prevent all sales of their products on e bay.[citation needed]
* In November 2006, a U.K. High Court ruled that a VeRO rightsholder's takedown request to e bay constituted a legal threat under design patent law. Since groundless legal threats under design patent law are unlawful, the ruling holds that groundless VeRO takedown requests based on design patents are also unlawful. Further, the text of the ruling appears critical of the VeRO program in general: "It is entirely wrong for owners of intellectual property rights to attempt to assert them without litigation, or without the threat of litigation, in reply."
A source of frustration for some e bay users is that owing to the company's size, it offers no customer support by phone, instead referring all ordinary members to its online help features. Apart from a library of self-help resources, these features consist mainly of e-mail contact forms and "Live Help," which lets users chat with customer service representatives via instant messaging, however this is not availiable to users from international sites such as e bay.co.uk. In fact, most visitors to the e bay site will not find any company phone number listed at all.
e bay does, in fact, have a phone support department, but that service is limited to members of the rank "Silver PowerSeller" and above, the company's term for members who sell at least $3,000 worth of goods per month on the site. The phone number for that service is not published, although there have been reports on e bay's own forums and weblogs that customers who manage to obtain the number through legal documents are rudely replied and told to use the online service instead.
Other e bay controversies
Other notable controversies involving e bay include:
* In May 2000, e bay seller Kenneth Walton auctioned an oil painting on e bay for $135,805, due to speculation that it might be the work of California modernist Richard Diebenkorn. Walton pretended to know nothing about art and claimed to be surprised by the price the painting fetched, and the auction attracted international media attention. In several investigative reports by The New York Times, it was revealed that Walton was in fact an experienced e bay art dealer with several unhappy customers, and that he had colluded with two other e bay sellers to bid up each other's auctions. The Times described this as a "shill bidding ring". Walton and his cohorts were banned from e bay and eventually convicted of fraud by the federal government in the first ever prosecution for shill bidding on e bay.
* On 28 May 2003, a U.S. District Court jury found e bay guilty of willful patent infringement and ordered the company to pay US$35 million in damages. The plaintiff was MercExchange, which had accused e bay in 2000 of infringing on three patents (one of which is used in e bay's "Buy It Now" feature for fixed-price sales, 30 percent of e bay's business and growing). The decision was appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). The CAFC affirmed the judgment of willful infringement, and reversed the lower court and granted a permanent injunction. e bay appealed the permanent injunction to the U.S. Supreme Court, which on May 15, 2006 found an injunction is not required nor automatic in this or any patent case where guilt has been established. The case was sent back to the Virginia district court for consideration of the injunction and a trial on another MercExchange patent the inventor claims covers the remaining 70 percent of e bay's business model. (see e bay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C. . This case has been particularly controversial since the patents involved are considered to be business method patents. (See also Software patent debate)
* On 28 July 2003, e bay and its subsidiary PayPal agreed to pay a $10 million fine to settle allegations that they aided illegal offshore and online gambling. According to the settlement, PayPal between mid-2000 and November 2002 transmitted money in violation of various U.S. federal and state online gambling laws. e bay's announcement of its acquisition of PayPal in early July said that PayPal would begin the process of exiting this market, and was already doing so when the ruling occurred. These offenses occurred prior to e bay's purchase of PayPal.
* On 17 December 2004, Avnish Bajaj, CEO of e bay's Indian subsidiary Baazee.com, was arrested after a video clip showing oral sex between two Indian students was sold online. The company denied knowing the content of what they were selling (because it is a venue, not a retailer) and removed the offensive material as soon as they became aware of it. The Indian government attempted to make the case that Bajaj had violated India's IT Act, which forbids "publishing, transmitting or causing to publish" obscene material, even though the actual material was never published on Baazee's servers. e bay supported Baazee's defense.
* On 14 June 2005, e bay removed auction listings for originally free tickets to the Live 8 charity auction amid hundreds of complaints about such auctions. Normally, selling of charity tickets is legal under United Kingdom law.[citation needed]
* In 2005, the Australian National Rugby League tried unsuccessfully to persuade e bay to prevent scalpers from selling Grand Final tickets online.
* On 18 December 2006 e bay won a court case against Creative Festival Entertainment in Australia, allowing sellers to on-sell (or scalp) tickets for the Big Day Out concert. The case was won due to the big day out organizers not being able to fully enforce an anti-scalping policy printed on the back of the tickets. The presiding judge described the decision as "unfortunate".
* Some have criticized[weasel words] the emphasis e bay places on its subsidiary PayPal as a method of accepting payments.[attribution needed] e bay discourages sellers from using independent money-wiring companies such as Western Union and MoneyGram (Moneybookers is now allowed instead), stating that it prohibits or discourages certain forms of payment in order to reduce fraud. On the U.S. e bay, while sellers may accept such payments, they are prohibited from advertising them as a payment option. A similar policy applies to mailing cash as a payment option. Certain non-U.S. branches of e bay allow sellers to advertise wire transfers or mailed cash as payment options, provided such methods are not the only payment options the seller accepts.
* In late 2006 e bay effected a policy a change which showed less information about sellers once auctions reached a certain value. This policy has been criticised for making shill bidding much harder to detect, to the potential disadvantage of buyers and significant advantage to unethical sellers who may artificially inflate the price of an auction. An investigation by The Sunday Times in January 2007 uncovered substantial evidence of shill bidding on e bay.
Prohibited or Restricted Items
e bay in its earliest days was essentially unregulated, but as e bay grew, it found it necessary to restrict or forbid auctions for various items. Note that some of the restrictions relate to e bay.com (the US site), while other restrictions apply to specific European sites (such as Nazi paraphernalia). Regional laws and regulations may apply to the seller or the buyer. Among the hundred or so banned or restricted categories:
Unusual sale items
* In June 2005, the wife of Tim Shaw, a British radio DJ on Kerrang! 105.2, sold Tim's Lotus Esprit sports car with a Buy It Now price of 50 pence after she heard him flirting with model Jodie Marsh on air. The car was sold within 5 minutes, and it was requested that the buyer pick it up the same day.[69]
* In May 2005, a Volkswagen Golf that had previously been registered to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who had been elected Pope Benedict XVI) was sold on e bay's German site for €188,938.88. The winning bid was made by the GoldenPalace.com online casino, known for their outrageous e bay purchases.[70]
* A seaworthy 16,000 ton aircraft carrier, formerly the British HMS Vengeance, was listed early in 2004. The auction was removed when e bay determined that the vessel qualified as ordinance, even though all weapons systems had been removed.[71]
* In September 2004, the owner of MagicGoat.com sold the contents of his trash can to a middle school language arts teacher, who intended to have her students write essays about the trash before it was cleared away by a well-meaning janitor.[72]
* Water that was said to have been left in a cup Elvis Presley once drank from was sold for $455. The few tablespoons came from a plastic cup Presley sipped at a concert in North Carolina in 1977.[73]
* A Coventry University student got ?1.20 for a single cornflake.[74]
* A man from Brisbane, Australia attempted to sell New Zealand at a starting price of $.01AUD. The price had risen to $3,000 before e bay closed the auction.[75]
* One of the tunnel boring machines involved in the construction of the Channel Tunnel was auctioned on e bay in 2004.[76]
* A man from Arizona sold an air guitar on e bay for $5.50.
* A group of four men from Australia auctioned themselves to spend the weekend with the promise of "beers, snags, good conversation and a hell of a lot of laughs" for AU$1,300[77]
* Disney sold a retired Monorail Red (Mark IV Monorail) for $20,000[78]
* The German Language Association sold the German language to call attention for the growing influence of Pidgin-English in modern German.[79]
* In late November 2005, the original Hollywood sign was sold on e bay for $450,400.[80][81]
* In February 2007, after Britney Spears shaved all of her hair off in a Los Angeles salon, it was listed on e bay for $1million USD before it was taken down after some considerable controversy.[82]
* Bridgeville, California was the first city to be sold on e bay in 2002, and has been up for sale 3 times since.[83]
* Boston Red Sox left fielder Manny Ramirez attempted to sell his neighbor's JENN-AIR Gas Grill on e bay. The auction started at $3,000 and the price escalated to an astounding $99,999,999, the maximum amount allowed by e bay. The auction was later closed by e bay because of the promise of an autographed baseball going to the winner as well as the grill; it is a violation of e bay policy to include items other than those advertised.[84]
Using MissionFish as an arbiter, e bay allows sellers to donate a portion of their auction proceeds to a charity of the seller's choice. Some high profile charity auctions have been advertised on the e bay home page, and have raised large amounts of money in a short time. For example, a furniture manufacturer raised over $35,000 for Ronald McDonald House by auctioning off beds that had been signed by celebrities.



E bay, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is an American e-commerce company based in Seattle, Washington. It was one of the first major companies to sell goods over the Internet and was one of the iconic stocks of the late 1990s dot-com bubble. After the bubble burst, E bay faced scepticism about its business model, but it made its first annual profit in 2003.
Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, and launched in 1995, E bay began as an online bookstore, though it soon diversified its product lines, adding VHSs, DVDs, music CDs, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and more.
E bay has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, France, China, and Japan. It ships globally on selected products.
E bay was founded in 1994, spurred by what Bezos refers to as his "regret minimization framework," i.e. his effort to fend off late-in-life regret for not staking a claim in the Internet gold rush.[1] It is common lore that Bezos wrote its business plan while he and his wife drove a 1988 Chevrolet Blazer from Fort Worth, Texas to Bellevue, Washington.[2]
The company began operating as an online bookstore under the name Cadabra.com (as in abracadabra), a name that Bezos quickly abandoned due to its sounding like "cadaver".[2] While the largest brick-and-mortar bookstores and mail-order catalogs for books might offer 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could offer many times more. Bezos renamed his company "E bay" after the world's most voluminous river. The company was incorporated in 1994 in the state of Washington, began service in July 1995, and was reincorporated in 1996 in Delaware. The first book ever sold by E bay was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.[3] E bay had its initial public offering on May 15, 1997, trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol AMZN at an IPO price of US$18.00 per share (equivalent to US$1.50 after three stock splits during the late 1990s).
E bay's initial business plan was unusual: the company did not expect to turn a profit for four to five years. In retrospect, the strategy was effective. E bay grew at a steady pace in the late 1990s while many other Internet companies grew at a blindingly fast pace. E bay's "slow" growth caused a number of its stockholders to complain, saying that the company was not reaching profitability fast enough. When the Dot-com bubble burst and many e-companies went out of business, E bay persevered and finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2002: a meager US$5 million, just 1? per share, on revenues of over US$1 billion, but it was important symbolically. The firm has since remained profitable: net income was US$35.3 million in 2003, US$588.5 million in 2004, US$359 million in 2005, and US$190 million in 2006 (including a US$662 million charge on R&D in 2006). Nevertheless, the firm's cumulative profits remain negative, since the positive performance of recent years is not yet sufficient to wipe out the losses of the past, as of 2005 the accumulated deficit stood at US$2.03 billion.
Revenue continued to grow thanks to product diversification and international presence: US$3.9 billion in 2002, US$5.3 billion in 2003, US$6.9 billion in 2004, US$8.5 billion in 2005, and US$10.7 billion in 2006. On November 21, 2005, E bay entered the S&P 500 index, replacing the venerable AT&T after it merged with SBC Communications.
Time Magazine named Bezos its 1999 Person of the Year in recognition of the company's success in popularizing online shopping.
The Web sites of Borders (borders.com, borders.co.uk), Waldenbooks (waldenbooks.com), Virgin Megastores (virginmega.com), CDNOW (cdnow.com), and HMV (hmv.com) are powered and hosted by E bay. Until June 30, 2006, typing ToysRUs.com into one's browser would similarly bring up E bay's Toys & Games tab; however, this relationship was terminated as the result of a lawsuit.[4]
E bay powers and operates retail web sites for Target, the NBA, Sears Canada, Sears UK, Benefit Cosmetics, Bebe Stores, Timex Corporation, Marks & Spencer, Mothercare and Bombay Company.
For a number of these companies, specifically the UK ones like Marks & Spencer and Mothercare, E bay provides the multi-channel solutions not just the web site. That means that it also powers the in store terminals, customer-service applications and phone-sales terminals.
It also powers, although does not host, AOL's Shop@AOL service. It achieves this via Web Services technology.
The company's global headquarters is located on Seattle, Washington's Beacon Hill. It has offices throughout other parts of greater Seattle.
E bay has steadily branched into retail sales of music CDs, videotapes and DVDs, software, consumer electronics, kitchen items, tools, lawn and garden items, toys & games, baby products, apparel, sporting goods, gourmet food, jewelry, watches, health and personal-care items, beauty products, musical instruments, industrial & scientific supplies, groceries and more.
The company launched E bay Auctions, its own Web auctions service, in March 1999. However it failed to chip away at industry pioneer eBay's juggernaut growth. E bay Auctions was followed by the launch of a fixed-price marketplace business called zShops in September 1999, and a failed Sotheby's/E bay partnership called sothebys.E bay in November. Although zShops failed to live up to its expectations, it laid the groundwork for the hugely successful E bay Marketplace service launched in 2001 that let customers sell used books, CDs, DVDs, and other products alongside new items. E bay Marketplace's main rival today is eBay's Half.com service.
On May 16, 2007 E bay announced it intends to launch its own online music store. Downloads will be sold without copy-protection. The store is to launch "later this year."[5]
In August 2007, E bay announced E bay Fresh, a grocery service offering perishable and nonperishable foods. Customers can pick up orders or have them delivered to their homes. Delivery is initially restricted to residents of Mercer Island, Washington, a wealthy suburb of Seattle.[6]
A popular feature of E bay is the ability for users to submit reviews to the web page of each product. As part of their review, users must rate the product on a rating scale from one to five stars. Such rating scales provide a basic idea of the popularity and dependability of a product.
Search Inside the Book is a feature which makes it possible for customers to search for keywords in the full text of many books in the catalog.[7] [8] The feature started out with 120,000 titles (or 33 million pages of text) on October 23, 2003. There are currently about 250,000 books in the program. E bay has cooperated with around 130 publishers to allow users to perform these searches. To avoid copyright violations, E bay does not return the computer-readable text of the book but rather a picture of the page containing the found excerpt, disables printing of the pages, and puts limits on the number of pages in a book a single user can access. E bay is planning to launch Search Inside the Book internationally. Additionally, customers can purchase access to read the entire book online via the E bay Upgrade program, although the selection of books eligible for this service is currently limited.
According to information in E bay discussion forums, E bay derives about 40% of its sales from affiliates, whom they call "Associates." An Associate is an independent seller or business that receives a commission for referring customers to the E bay site. Associates do this by placing links on their websites to the E bay homepage or to specific products. If a referral results in a sale, the Associate receives a commission from E bay. Worldwide, E bay has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs.[9] Associates can access the E bay catalog directly on their websites by using the E bay Web Services (AWS) XML service. E bay was one of the first online businesses to set up an affiliate marketing program.[10] AStore is a new affiliate product that allows Associates to embedded a subset of E bay products within, or linked to from, another website.
According to the Internet audience measurement website Compete.com, E bay attracts approximately 50 million U.S. consumers to its website on a monthly basis (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/E bay).
In 2002, E bay became the exclusive retailer for the much-hyped Segway Human Transporter. Bezos was an early supporter of the Segway before its details were made public.
On June 21, 2003, E bay coordinated what was at the time one of the largest sales and distribution events in e-commerce history with the sale of over 1.3 million copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, since beaten by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with a sale of over 2 million copies preordered in 2007.
On July 16, 2005, E bay celebrated its 10th anniversary by telecasting a worldwide live concert hosted by Bill Maher and artists such as Bob Dylan and Norah Jones.
E bay launched E bay Web Services (AWS) in 2002. The service provides programmatic access to many features leveraged behind the scenes on its own website. AWS was rapidly adopted by what now amount to tens of thousands of software developers.
In March 2006, E bay launched an online storage service called E bay Simple Storage Service (E bay S3). An unlimited number of data objects, from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes in size, can be stored in S3 and distributed via HTTP or BitTorrent. The service charges monthly fees for data stored and for data transferred.
In August 2006, E bay also introduced E bay Elastic Compute Cloud (E bay EC2), a virtual site farm, allowing users to use the E bay infrastructure with its high reliability to run diverse applications ranging from running simulations to web hosting.
In November 2005, E bay began testing E bay Mechanical Turk, an application programming interface (API) allowing programs to dispatch tasks to human processors.
On August 2, 2007 E bay launched a payment service specifically targeted at developers. E bay FPS has facilities for developing many different charging models including micro-payments. The service also gives developers easy access to E bay customers.
E bay announced E bay Connect in 2005. It enables authors to post remarks that appear at the bottom of the detail pages for each of their books and on the E bay home page of those who have bought their books.
E bay Shorts is a program launched in 2005. The program offers exclusive short form content including short stories and non-fiction pieces from best selling authors, all available for immediate download at $0.49. As of June 2007, the program has over 1,700 pieces and is adding about 50 new pieces per week.
In August 2006, E bay launched product wikis (later folded into Amapedia) and discussion forums for certain products. There are set guidelines that follow standard message board conventions. Discussion boards were later expanded to include deals in the Gold Box[15] and to cover collections of items with the same user-provided tags.[16]
In February 2005, E bay launched E bay Prime in the continental United States.[17] E bay Prime subscribers pay $79 per year and receive free 2-day shipping on all items shipped by E bay with no minimum purchase amount. Overnight shipping for Prime members is $3.99 per item. Prime benefits extend to three family members in the same household.[18]
E bay Prime became available in Japan in June 2007. Japanese customers may pay ?3,900 per year and receive same-day shipping on orders shipped to the Kanto region and next-day delivery to other locations.[19]
In 2001, E bay was one of the first online stores to begin accepting donations to the Red Cross on behalf of 9/11 victims. For several days the company dedicated its entire home page for this cause.[citation needed]
In 2004, E bay launched its Presidential Candidates feature, whereby customers could donate from US$5 to US$200 to the campaigns of U.S. presidential hopefuls, resurrecting the E bay Honor System for the purpose. The Honor System was originally launched in 2001 as a way for E bay customers to "tip" their "favorite Web sites and to buy digital content on the Web," E bay collecting 2.9% of the payment plus a flat fee of 30 cents. It has never been shut down, but had fallen into relative disuse.
At the end of 2004, with the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, E bay set up an online donation channel to the American Red Cross using the Honor System, waiving its processing fee. As of January 3, 2005, over 162,000 individuals had donated over US$13.1 million in this way. The same week, E bay created similar channels for the British, Canadian, French, German, and Japanese Red Cross organizations via its international sites. Over 7,000 Britons donated more than $350,000; 900 Canadians over $56,000; 660 French over $23,000; 2,900 Germans over $145,000; and 1,900 Japanese over $66,000.
E bay reactivated its Red Cross donation channel when Hurricane Katrina struck at the end of August 2005. As of September 8, over 98,000 payments had been made totaling over US$10.7 million.
In January 2007 E bay launched Amapedia, a collaborative wiki for user-generated content related to "the products you like the most." Amapedia replaced E bay's ProductWiki product, and all ProductWiki content was copied into Amapedia at launch.
On August 15, 2007 E bay launched a program called E bay Vine, which allows the site's top product reviewers free access to prerelease products from vendors participating in the program.
In 1999 the E bay Bookstore Cooperative of Minneapolis, Minnesota sued E bay for trademark infringement. The cooperative had been using the name "E bay" since 1970, but reached an out-of-court agreement to share the name with the on-line retailer.[20]
The company has been controversial for its alleged use of patents as a competitive hindrance. The "1-click patent"[21] is perhaps the best-known example of this. E bay's use of the one-click patent against competitor Barnes and Noble's website led the Free Software Foundation to announce a boycott on E bay in December 1999.[22] The boycott was discontinued in September 2002.[23] On May 12, 2006, the USPTO ordered a reexamination of the "One-Click" patent, based on a request filed by Peter Calveley. Calveley cited as prior art an earlier e-commerce patent and the Digicash electronic cash system.
On February 22, 2000, the company was granted a patent covering an Internet-based customer referral system, or what is commonly called an "affiliate program". Reaction was swift and negative. Industry leaders Tim O'Reilly and Charlie Jackson spoke out strongly against this patent and O'Reilly published an open letter to Bezos protesting the 1-click patent and the affiliate-program patent, and petitioning him to "avoid any attempts to limit the further development of internet commerce". O'Reilly collected 10,000 signatures with this petition. Bezos responded with his own open letter. The protest ended with O'Reilly and Bezos visting Washington D.C. to lobby for patent reform.
E bay does not publish its toll-free customer service number (+1-800-201-7575) on its own web site. Customers are instead asked to submit written service requests (which are answered by e-mail) or to use a click-to-call service to be connected by phone to an available service representative.[25] There are numerous Web pages that exist solely to publish the E bay customer service phone numbers, one of which received in excess of 23,000 visits in December 2004 alone.[26] Despite the perceived difficulty in reaching customer service by phone, "[n]o retailer or service provider in the ACSI has higher customer satisfaction than E bay."[27][28]
In November 2000, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) began an unsuccessful campaign to organize E bay employees at several of their fulfillment centers. At the same time, the Communications Workers of America undertook a campaign to unionize some 400 customer-service representatives in Seattle. Neither group of employees found the external organizations' attempt signficant; neither union obtained enough interest to petition the National Labor Relations Board for an election.
In late June 2007, shortly after the death of professional wrestler Chris Benoit, E bay displayed a special note on search results pages for the term "WWE": “Tragic news from the WWE. Wrestler Chris Benoit and his wife and son have been found dead in their Georgia home, and police are investigating the situation as a possible murder-suicide.” The caption was then followed by a photo and a link to purchase the WWE Chris Benoit: Hard Knocks DVD. E bay later removed the offending message after widespread complaints in the professional wrestling community.[29]bankofamerica
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