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Technology Stocks : eBay - Superb Internet Business Model -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pass pass who wrote (4207)	7/23/1999 1:51:00 AM
From: Bill Harmond	Respond to of 7772

>>What does EBay have others don't? Buyers and sellers. It's the principle of network effects. Bidders go where the listings are, sellers go where the bidders are, etc, etc. If it's scalable it's a perpetual-motion machine. Scalability is an issue for eBay at the moment. Visitors stay a long time, longer than any other site, and that puts demands on infrastructure.

To: pass pass who wrote (4207)	7/23/1999 3:08:00 AM
From: Doug Fowler	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 7772

"What does eBay have that others don't?" eBay has, by far, the best and highest traffic of buyers and sellers. Yahoo has almost 500,000 auctions, compared to eBay's 2.4M+. But Yahoo's auction count is very deceiving, with only 30,000 new items going up daily, versus 450,000 for eBay. In addition, Yahoo auctions produce FAR FEWER bids than eBay auctions, and FAR FEWER page views. I posted an ad on Yahoo two days ago and have received 4 page views and 0 bids so far. (It was not worth the 15 minutes of my time it took to post the "free" ad.) By contrast, the SAME EXACT ad on eBay produced almost 2000 page views and 15 bids (Dutch auction) in its first two days, and I ultimately sold 35 copies at $29.95 after less than 6 days. Sure, I paid $100 to run the ad in the Featured area of eBay, and I am paying another $25 in commissions. With costs of goods at $2 each, and assuming a few deadbeat bidders, I am making more than a $750 profit on eBay. In addition, I am getting all kinds of exposure on eBay and lots of visits to my web site. With Yahoo auctions, I have NEVER, EVER sold a single copy of my software. So, I have never made one cent in profit. The same (featured) auction on Amazon auctions typically breaks even to producing a $100 to $200 profit. So, as a seller, with whom do you think I spend more of my time and money? It may not take much investment to build an auction site, but it takes a TREMENDOUS amount of money to get the buyers and sellers there. Nobody comes remotely close to eBay in terms of buyers, sellers, range and quantity of products, etc. And there are many who are spending a ton of money trying. Amazon has the best chance (of the current players) to be a distant second place player.