The success of eBay and its causes~~

" i STARTED eBay as an experiment, as a side hobby
basically, while i had my day job."
Founder and Chairman of eBAy- Pierre Omidyar~~


ebay is the world largest online auction sites with a global customer base of 233 million in which people and businesses trade the million item worldwide, national or local basis. eBay is found by Pierre Omidyar in 1995.Pierre Omidyar knew that people need a central location to buy and sells all kinds of item and to meet others with similar interest. eBay has created for the sale of good and services in the world wide web by the intensity community of an individual or small businesses. In year 1998, Pierre and his cofounder Jeff Skoll has brought Meg Whitman to sustain the business. Meg had created an experienced management team and build a strong vision for eBay that eBay is a company that’s running a business that connecting people to trade and not selling items to them.

“create an efficient market where individuals could benefit from participating in an efficient market, kind of level the playing field”- Pierre Omidyar


Internet businesses to be successful, the main things that need to consider that internet business would require an easy URL to remember. The users will more likely to visit a more memorable site such as eBay. eBay also provide shopping cart to convenient their customers. eBay is convenient online trading website for the buyers and sellers. The sellers are permitted to list their items for sales on the website and advertise it with a picture and descriptions to a world wide audience. Moreover the buyers can ask or order on the specific items which they are interested in. All the eBay users can browse through the listed items in a fully automated way. These items are grouped according with each type of auctions which has its own category.

eBay has the ability to remodel those primarily local market into global ones with a low cost. Human always has the need or interest on buying or selling the used, surplus or collectible items. Previously, they have to buy through some garage sales or advertisement in the newspaper.

eBay has growth by bringing in a large numbers of buyers and sellers. The more buyers there are, the more sellers were liked to participate. The more sellers they are, the more items to buy, so its will attract more buyers.

eBay give many people a chance to start their small business with small amount of capital and without paying the rent for the property, utility bills and so on. During the recession time, many people were interested to sell things in eBay. Some were interested in purchasing used item. Besides that, company also interest in buying some industrial items online at steep discount to formal channels.


eBay earn the money through the listing fees and collecting a percentage
of the selling price of items sold through the site. EBay also owns
PayPal, which allow the user to make their payment online and
makes money from the transaction fees.

eBay has growth potentially by successfully introduce the new markets such as car sales which will not expect to be run on this business model. Even though only a small percentage of world’s population was the users of ebay. Lastly ebay has really listen to the customers and its ability to respond quickly when competitive threats come along. eBay has managed to receive the feedback from the customers and bring innovations to eBay. That’s why eBay has successfully accumulated a large number of sellers and buyers in a single marketplace.

For my own opinion, i feel that ebay is really useful for the sellers and buyers also, so that it get many support from the public. It really benefit the users and help the users to be success. Pierre Omidyar and his partner are really intelligent person who create this way to help people around to reach their dream. Even for me who is just a under-graduate student also can made my own business through ebay.

“ Having millions of buyers and sellers who can make adjustments far faster than any company could is a huge advantage” – Meg Whitman


http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&id=539
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~magnus/ief248a/eBay/history.html
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/18371/why_is_ebay_so_successful.html
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=345309

The failure of Kozmo.com

Kozmo.com was founded in March 1998 by two young Wall Street professionals, Joseph Park and Yong Kang in New York City. It was an online company which provides home delivery service for free within an hour. It is designed to be the convenience store of the Net. Kozmo.com running from magazine to CD’s to movies to food which customers had wide-variety choice to consume at Kozmo.com site. The main client of Kozmo.com is college students and young professionals because it is bringing convenience to the people.
Kozmo.com is shutting down in April 2001 after the collapse of the dot-com bubble by laying off its staff of 1,100 employees. Kozmo.com had filed an IPO before layoffs. Based on the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company had revenue of $ 3.5 million with a net loss of $26.3 million in 1999.

Causes for failure :
1. The cost of delivery is expensive when a small good which ordered by customer is delivered point-to-point within one hour.
2. Kozmo.com had expanding their business to 11 cities. Some business analysts said that Kozmo.com’s business model only can run efficiency in the packed and hustler city. They also commented that the services can work in only a few other cities around the world, such as London and Paris.
3. Kozmo.com is stopped catering to their main client when they are target to upscale clients who expected to order expensive products.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-255710.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com

The History & evolution of E-Commerce

Do you remember buying airline tickets before the Internet?

Can you imagine buying a new computer or car without doing hours of Web research?

How about Chinese New Year shopping? You would actually have to step into the shopping mall.

Now, this may not be a MUST anymore.

E-Commerce (which means electronic commerce), is usually defined as the conduct of business online, via electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. Nowadays, millions of people are involved in e-commerce on the Internet, for example, they visit world wide web sites to buy books, order foods, or check their bank accounts. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage.

To know more about electronic commerce, we would have to drawn back to 30 years ago. At first, electronic commerce meant the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, which uses technology such as Electronic Data Interchange(EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer(EFT). These technologies were both introduced in the late 1970s, which allowed businesses to send commercial documents, such as the company's purchase order or invoices electronically.

In 1980, the growth and acceptance of credit cards, ATM and telephone banking were also forms of electronic commerce. Meanwhile, another form of e-commerce was the airline reservation system.

While, online shopping was invented in the UK in 1979 by Micheal Aldrich and it was used extensively particularly by those auto-mobile manufacturers during the 1980s, such as Ford, Peugeot-Talbot, General Motors and Nissan.

From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include ERP systems, data mining and data warehousing.

In 1994, Pizza Hut start offers pizza ordering on its Web page. While, some companies attempts to offer flower delivery and magazine subscriptions online.

During 1995, Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com and the first commercial-free 24 hour, internet-only radio stations, Radio HK and NetRadio had start broadcasting. Besides that, Dell and Cisco begin to aggressively use Internet for their daily commercial transactions. Moreover, eBay is founded by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar, which now becomes a famous online Auction Web.

And by the end of 2000, a lot of European and American business companies offered their services through the World Wide Web. Since then people start to associate a word "e-commerce" with the ability of purchasing various goods through the Internet using secure protocols and electronic payment services.

Google is changing everything

Do you use Google search engines?

Do you know what is Google spreadsheet?

Do you know what is enterprise search?


~} Is a company associated with E-Commerce.

~} Is running about 500,000 servers.

~} Has an outstanding search engine.

~} Has many special features that make our life easier.

Google is a company associated with E-Commerce that has much impacted to our work and life. As a student, I always using to Google search engine to search for the information required for my assignment. Google is a company that primarily provides web based search and advertising services. Besides search engine and advertising tools, Google has do many other things. Let's explore some Google's activities.

A Glimpse at Google's Activities

Google has offer the Google Docs - which is a free, Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and form application offered by Google. It combines the features of two services, Writely and Spreadsheets. Google Docs allows us to create and edit documents amongst users and non-users in real time. Google spreadsheet can import and export data from Comma Separated Value (.csv), Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) that up to 1MB. The data of open documents are automatically saved and a revision history is automatically kept.

Google is studying the demand for Google Spreadsheet to work with Google Base - which is an online database service that allows Google users to post various types of information through Internet. From the view of the analysts, Google Base is classified as e-advertising, which is an e-commerce activity by helping user to display the relevant information on Google's main search index, such as Google Shopping search and Google Local search.

Honestly, I'm a road blind. So before I'm going to a new area I will search for the location I wanted to go from the Google Local search. Its helping me a lot especially when I want to go for the shopping mall that is hard to find. Other than that, Google shopping search also helps me a lot to compare the product price. It is very useful for the people like me who don't like to go shopping.

In 2006 Google expanded its business by offering Google Office - which is a freeware. Besides, Google offer a set of Web programs such as e-mail, communication, and scheduling. Other than that, Google also offer Google Desktop, Google Earth, Google Maps, Picasa, Google Mini, Google Calendar, and etc.

Google Desktop is function like the windows sidebar for Windows Vista, before this I'm using Windows XP so it is very useful for me to display the features of Google Desktop on my desktop. Picasa is a photo viewer and editor, which is a freeware that allowed us to customize our pictures. I'm using Picasa 3, I like to use it to capture some screenshot for the games I play. With running Picasa 3, I just need to press the print screen button on my keyboard to capture the screen shot for my games, then I will upload it to Picase Web Album.



For more Google's products, visit:-
http://pack.google.com/intl/en/pack_installer.html

Enterprise Search

Google enterprise search identifies and enable specific content across the enterprise to be indexed, searched, and displayed to authorized users. New Google Search Appliance (GSA) allowed visitors or intranet users to get the information they needed with fast, familiar Google search. Whether you index hundreds of pages sources or many millions of pages, Google delivers relevant results that increase the usability and value of your business information.

One of the organization that is using Google Search Appliance is Kaiser Permanante - which is the America's largest nonprofit health maintenance organization (HMOs).
Google Search Appliance helps Kaiser's clinicians easier to search for the information from the site any time any where inside the organization. Most of the time doctors and nurses use the search engine to help them check the side effects of the new medications, reach diagnoses and specify treatments, consultant clinical research studies, and etc. Besides that, Google's spell-checking capability is especially useful in the medical profession, due to the pharmaceutical product names are difficult and doctor's handwriting can be problematic.

As my personal's opinion, Google is really helping me a lot with its search engine and its special features. It is really changing mylife to be easier. Google provides a lot of freeware that is needed to be purchased in previous time. Especially for student, we hardly to get income from part time job or no income at all, so Google helps us to save a lot. Thanks Google!


Referencing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs
http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html