Online Auction – eBay

In 1995 the emergence of a new type of company came to be, originally called AuctionWeb, the company became a world-wide sensation know as eBay. This company works much in the same way a regular auction would, the main difference is that eBay works as an e-commerce business, with all transactions occurring over the internet. The way eBay works is that a seller creates a profile and then provides charging information such as a credit card or PayPal account. After you have your profile created you list your products and post pictures of the products on line. EBay has what is referred to as an insertion fee; these fees vary depending on the product being listed, although the offer I found was your first 50 insertions are free. After listing your product and an asking price you sit back and let the bidding begin. Consumers, located from all over the world, go to the eBay website and offer bids on the products you have listed with your account, the winning bid purchases the product based on the last bid they offered, which is generally the highest bid, these products are listed with a time based allotment, after a certain amount of time the bidding closes and the highest bidder purchases the product.

After your product has sold then eBay collects a percentage of the selling price, again this depends on the product being auctioned. There are also added extras that eBay may charge you for when you list your product and how you list it, for example, listing more than one photo for your product increases the cost you pay for the listing, as well as different font styles, larger than normal photos and other extra features you may choose to add. The advantages for eBay is that there are no retail outlet costs and very little overhead, basically the only costs incurred are the maintenance of the website and any software upgrades that would be needed. The downside to this business is that consumers do not get to see the product in person and you are locked into the last bid offered, you may not get your asking price and could lose out on expected profit margin. I feel that if I were to open my own e-tail business I would use eBay for a few simple reasons. First it is an already established and popular site that has many consumers looking for products. Second is that if I were to open an e-tail business I would want to make sure that I have plenty of inventories in stock and that I could offer prices that would ensure a profit margin.

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