Abstract
Since the advent of the internet, our world has become a global village. Distances have been eliminated in a virtual sense. Anybody can buy or send anything around the world within no time. Buyers and sellers are now very close to each other like never before. This opportunity has been cashed by many buyers, sellers, and other stakeholders. eBay provides a platform to sellers and buyers, where they meet and trade without going anywhere and in spite of living thousands of miles away from each other. In this article, we will study how the internet affected the lives of consumers from the perspective of eBay – the giant platform.
Introduction
The websites that allocate consumers to carry out “one-click” price assessments for product proposals from multiple retailers are termed as “Internet Shopbots’. As price is a key determinant factor of preference of the consumer, I discover that yet in the midst of shopbot consumers, branded retailers, and retailers a consumer stayed until that time cling to considerable cost benefits in head-to-head price assessments. Moreover, consumers are very responsive to how the summation cost is assigned between the product costs, the logistics charges, delivery tax, and additionally they are pretty responsive to the ordinal position of retailer proposals with regard to the product costs. The topical investigation has revealed that consumers utilize brand name as an alternative for the reliability of the retailer in connection with the non-contractible features of the goods’ stock, for instance one of the feature is the logistics time and duration.
Main body
In the present day unrelenting cutbacks in e-commerce outlay and the go up in marketable applications of the Internet predicts a analogous rebellion in the transaction and its consumer scrutiny (Kamakura and Russell 124). What is more, the hi-tech potentialities of the vacuity shrink consumer’s effort and toggle expenditures to help eradicate some cutthroat leads that retailers would benefit from a corporeal souk. Thus Internet shopbots are symbolic of its competence and the enhanced proficiency.
From the time when the Internet shopbots were born in 1995, auctions on the Internet have nurtured with a remarkable tempo. In such shopbots, one of the biggest consumer-oriented shopbot is eBay, where individual sellers catalog their products for auction, and individual consumers bid for those products. Subsequent to their three dealing annuls, eBay by now accomplished over 1 billion US$ in transactions in 1998, and by 2004 their revenue mounted to $34.2 billion (NASDAQ 5). Overall, 56.1 million users either bid or listed an item on eBay during 2004, and as per the July 2005 survey conducted for eBay by ACNielsen International Research, a probable 724,000 populace of Americans account eBay as a primary or secondary resource of their earnings and it makes eBay one of the biggest Internet marketplaces on the planet (Reiley, Bryan, Prasad & Reeves, pp. 2-4).
Take the example of an Oklahoman consumer, Sam Alexis. Intended for a long period, Sam managed a store in Boulder, Colorado, selling first-edition books. Except with an on paper mail-order record, she established that most of her customers resided by a two-hour drive from her store. Commencing in the fall of 1997, Sam embarked on listing her more costly books on eBay auction site. She astounded when volumes that would usually stay behind for months in her store vended swiftly even at profitable rates. At a standstill, her confined business got on worldwide magnitude. She was shortly auctioning with consumers over and done with the USA, Germany, UK, Australia, Russia and consumers all around. So she fell in love with eBay.
If the amount of Internet-connected consumers is mounting very rapidly, hence the scale of business carried out by the average consumer should also grow up even sooner. Likewise, there is merely added auction over the internet each year, performed by both consumers and entrepreneur. hardly four years before, e-tailer websites were little, and consumer who would characteristically offer a credit-card number over the touchtone phone to a index sales representative that were petrified about employing plastic to purchase a flannel shirt over the internet from a shopbot. Evidently the rush of internet shopbots like eBay has smoothed way for individual consumers to purchase and vend online very handily. In contrast to customary shopbots, online auctions offer a lot of benefits such as lesser seek and catalog prices for both purchasers and vendors besides, applicants in online auctions do not require to actually focus an auction site nor do they require to entrust around the clock throughout the auction stage.
These days, Internet consumers have gone astray with fear, and they currently purchase the whole lot, from a needle to a luxurious car and from foodstuff to gardening tools. The ecommerce is getting brawnier. As of fewer than $8 billion in 1998, Forrester Research calculated that internet transactions will achieve $108 billion by the year 2003 and it makes about 6 percent of the entire estimated retail auction of the United States of America. (Ledbetter 42-65)
The Retail auction on the internet dig up the most of the buzz, save for the business-to-business (B2B) segment of e-commerce, the largest single day of online consumer business on or after this script happened December 14 of 1999 once, BizRate.com announced that consumers put 2.5 million online goods bids valued over US$240 million.
EBay involves itself in the demand-based or active cost fragment of ecommerce. At hand, business deals are evaluated exclusively by the consumers. It is primarily dissimilar from what the majority of us are familiarized with. Typically, vendors build the cost pronouncements, and the consumer either agrees to the prices or explores somewhere else for a cost effective transaction. While in demand-based cost fragment, consumers make their mind up for these important resolutions. As getting the auction online is a significant modernization, and is one of the supreme applications of the Internet technology ceaselessly; though the internet has smoothed the progress of a range of business and commerce doings. A lot of these are picked up openly from offline forms and supplied no better charge or expediency for its consumers.
The outcome of the marketplace traits fairly portrayed that if the consumer is not expected to be twisted when he vacate to purchase an automobile because there are plainly too lots of vendors and a good deal with no trouble accessible information. If the consumer is taken to the cleaners, he has no one to censure but himself only. Contrarily, the prospect to twist the automobile vendor is similarly restricted, given that the copiousness of other potential consumers is there, and vendors have countless information. The thing is termed as the market efficiency. Market efficiency has the favorable consequence of carrying auctioning and bidding prices nearer collectively and closer to factual rates (Wolverton). For instance in the Middle Eastern bazaar, eBay has magnetized a sundry society of dynamic dealers. Most of these dealers and vendors who go into the spot on the odd occasion to drop off a piece of not in use goods or, equally to get hold alike at the same time expectantly at a negotiable rate. While others are sternly collectors and traders of books, antiques, coins, automobiles, and other items for which internet auctions have greatly inflated the band of obtainable products and dealing associates (Green, p. 15). From a severely commerce stance, the most appealing affiliates of eBay’s online community are people like Sam, the dealers and other small-business operators who are spending to make use of the website as an innovative and money-making strait of allocation. Consequently eBay has enlarged their geographic contact to extra fabulous profundity to their bands of prospective consumers. However, data from a shopbot permits its consumers to inspect more intimately how the endearing cost of an auction is resolute. In addition, one more attractive object on eBay is that inexpert bidders are inclined to tender more futile bids to their point.
The customary person-to-person markets, on the contrary are extremely ineffective. As they are geographically disjointed, creating a big problem for consumers and traders to meet up and carry out a transaction. Added to the hitch, transaction prices are quite sky-scraping. Cost scales are tricky and unfeasible to discover. For instance, if the consumer is finding a variety of Big Bopper albums, his barely opportunity of striking reimbursement is to rake through the old evidence stores in an extensive geographic region and an erroneously prolonged procedure. The chance of stumbling on the precise values the consumer wants through flea markets or classified ads is yet more far-flung. If luckily the consumer discovers someone vending a Big Bopper album, he will have no orientation tip for its cost. The vendor will be uniformly confronted; exploring and linking with the buyer would be complicated and pricey, particularly if he has to way out classified ads (Dougherty76-77). EBay had a first-rate vanguard in the competition to get hold of auction consumers. However with up-to-the-minute players in the market jumping into the fixture every month, its executives are acquainted with that they would endure defections and incapable to detain new market zone if they did not create their site ever more larger, recovered, and more wide-ranging. Their rejoinder was a two-sided approach that brings in new higher-priced product groupings and pulls out the overhaul worldwide.
Conclusion
At the onset, eBay had been austerely a person-to-person maneuver. In excess of instants, this lengthened to encompass small-dealer-to-person buy and sell; a assemblage that now the volume selling regulator. EBay has established an innate feedback circle where generating a decisive accumulation of bidders boosts the fee gained by traders, which raises the number of consumers, and attracts more consumers. Every single one markers, conversely, spots the business-to-business trading seeing that the superior setting in the upcoming race.
Works Cited
Barberis, Thaler. 2002 “A survey of Behavioral Finance”, Handbook of the Economics of Finance: n.p.
David Lucking-Reiley, Doug Bryan, Naghi Prasad, Daniel Reeves. “Pennies from eBay: the Determinants of Price in Online Auctions”, 2006: 2-4.
Heather Green, “The E.Biz 25”. BusinessWeek Online, 1999.
James Ledbetter, “The Internet Economy Gets Real”. The Standard, 1999.
Kamakura, Wagner A., Gary J. Russell. 1989. “A Probabilistic Choice Model for Market Segmentation and Elasticity Structure”. Journal of Marketing Research. 1989:124.
Han Lee and Ulrike Malmendier. 2005. “Do Consumers Know Their Willingness to Pay? Evidence from eBay Auctions”. Stanford University Press. 2005: 2. Web.
Nasqad. eBay INC. “Announces Fourth Quarter and Full year 2004 Financial Results”. Company Reports Record. 2005.
Steffano Korper and Juanita Ellis. “The E-Commerce Book: Building the E-Empire”. Morgan Kaufmann. 2001.
Terri Dougherty, “Oregon Goes Online”. eBay Magazine, 2000, pp. 76–77.
Troy Wolverton, “eBay Latest to Tout Its E-business Ways”. CNET News.com, 1999.