Finding on Ebay

A Short Introduction on eBay

eBay is an American internet company that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide. In addition to its original U.S. website, eBay has established localized websites in several other countries. To expand their market, eBay launched its Business & Industrial category in 2005 to break into the industrial surplus business where rare and valuable items are sold. For their European markets, eBay also opened its new eBay Express site in 2006 which operates as a standard Internet shopping site for consumers with United States addresses (eBay Express). The highlight of this feature is that consumers can pick selected items mirrored in eBay and purchase them from multiple sellers using a shopping cart. The UK version was also launched (eBay Express UK) but differs from the US version by only offering brand new items from pre-vetted business sellers. Following that, the German version was launched later in the year (eBay Express Germany). eBay Inc also owns PayPal, Skype, and other businesses.

Below are the topics that will be covered:
1) Purposes
2) Key Characteristics
3) Designs
4) Potential
5) Strength
6) Weaknesses
Special highlights

Purposes:
eBay.com is an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy n sell goods and services.
More of a trading post between consumers.

Key Characteristics:
· Selling/buying of 1st and 2nd hand goods.

· Fees – How eBay operates and profit as a business. It charges an Insertion Fee to list the item that is on auction. If the item does not sell then user will be charged for the insertion fee. However, users can still re-list their item for a second time and if it sells then the second insertion fee is refunded. If it’s still not sold for the second time then eBay will be charging for listing two auctions. The minimum insertion fee is at $0.30 and a maximum insertion fee of $4.80. Then when the auction closes another fee is charged, which is called a Final Value Fee. This depends on the closing price of the auction. For example if the auction ends at less than $25 the fee is 5.25% of the closing price.

· Features on eBay, including some tutorials and the live help link, require extra plug-ins and downloads do help user to surf through the site effortlessly.

· Millions of collectibles, appliances, computers, furniture, equipments, vehicles and other various items are listed,

· eBay added an eBay Community Wiki and eBay Blogs to its Community Content for consumers to interact among each other through the use of Discussion boards, Groups, Answer Centre, Chat Rooms and Reviews & Guides.

· In mobile aspects, it has eBay Mobile that offer SMS alerts, a WAP site, and J2ME clients that are available in certain markets.

Designs:
The design of this site is generally simple. It does not have much fanciful designs. At the same time it uses simple yet cognitive and logical way of searching for a particular item.
The navigation allows users to access pervious sub-sections that they are in, so for example if the user is in the "Baby Locks" section and wants to go back to the previous two sections, "Baby" section, the user can just click on it and eBay automatically loads back to that page.
Home > Buy > Baby > Baby Safety & Health > Baby Locks

This also provides a good way to display which sections the users has been through and to go back if a wrong selection has been made.

There isn’t much to describe about the color theme of eBay only that it is quite traditional. However, it is very well categorize into sections or boxes and lessen confusion for users.

Potential:
· eBay uses PayPal system.

· Send funds to a seller using credit card, Bank Deposit, Bank Deposit Express, Bank Drafts, Cash On Delivery, Money Orders, Personal Cheques/ Bank Cheques

· eBay accepts a PayPal but there are many means to purchase items there. Besides, PayPal Buyer Protection helps you in the event that you do not receive your item or the item is significantly different from its description in the seller's listing, eligible transactions will receive coverage up to $200 at no additional cost

Strength:
· Searching – While looking for a particular item user can search the item in a search box give on the top. Alternatively, an item can be searched by the category that it is in.

· Consumer could at any point in time email the seller regarding the items that is being auctioned. There is an “ask seller a question” link on each auction where you can get in touch with the seller through eBay’s mail system.

· There is also a place where feedback is left on a buyer or seller when the transaction is complete. This is like an eBay member’s report card. Users can leave a comment for each transaction that they gone through and that comment must be labeled positive, negative or neutral. This will assist either the buyer or seller to gauge whether it is a mild or great risk doing business with the other party.

· There is a category for “Everything Else”

· eBay is very user-friendly. Online tutorials for both buyers and sellers are provided, although purchasing and bidding on the merchandise is really self-explanatory.

· eBay also has a function that allows you to compare between the items that users have interest in, which will aid the user in deciding which one is a better buy.

Weaknesses
· Bidding loophole – This is a review that was written by a faithful user of eBay and I find that it is a loophole although it helps bidders to get what they want without competing with other bidders.
“You can enter your highest bid and have eBay keep bidding on your behalf, but I usually just make a note of when the auction ends, and wait to place my bid til the last few seconds, this is called a snipe, this way you can come in and get your item without alerting the other bidder that there is competition, because the way the eBay system works, in order to drive up the price the seller has to pay them for the Final Value Assessment, they e-mail all other bidders the second you outbid them, so if you announce your presence by bidding right away, you could easily end up in a "trench war" with other bidders, and not getting a good deal.”

Whether this is true or not, I’ve not tried it but it’s worth a try for those of you who are into auctions.

· eBay biggest boon may also be its biggest bane. With so many vendors vying for their items to be sold, it is possible that some items might easily be overlooked. Items in some categories move very quickly, but others can be posted for weeks at a time and not receive a single bid. Like when buying and selling stocks, you should look for the most active ones.

Special highlights
· There won’t be shipping charges if it is delivered to host country

Findings On Amazon

A Short Introduction on Amazon

Amazon 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, Amazon faced skepticism about its business model, but it made its first annual profit in 2003. It has also an international website where users from all over the world will be able to purchase. The countries covered included Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan and China.
Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, and launched in 1995, Amazon.com began as an online bookstore and it soon diversified its product lines, adding VHs, DVDs, music CDs, MP3s,computer softwares, video games, electronics, apparel, furnitures, food, toys, etc

Amazon.com also does provide an area where the users will be able to sell their items back to Amazon that was previously bought from Amazon. Basically it is a Business to Consumer and a Consumer to Consumer type of model.

To further elaborate the site, we will be covering the topics as follows:
1) Purposes
2) Features (e.g. business model, payment scheme)
3) Key Characteristics
4) Designs
5) Potential
6) Strength
7) Weaknesses
8) Special highlights

1) Purpose: Firstly the much of this part is written in the introductory and there isn’t much to cover here.

2) Features: Besides their huge selection of products in of 42 categories, the Amazon.com site offers consumers many other opportunities to enhance their shopping experience example will be downloading free MP3s to watching streaming video to using your Digital Locker.

3) Key Characteristics: Its B2B sells first hand items including delivery to the specific address that you wanted. The auction function is a C2C model where registered users could sell their items which they had bought previously from Amazon to other consumers.

4) Designs: Now we shall take a look that the design of the site. This includes layout, color schemes used and also navigation.
· It has an appealing and smoothing color. The background is white and the texts are either black or blue which the contrast of the words can be brought out clearly not causing stress on the eyes when reading. Some of the tabs are blue or yellow in color. This combination of colors together with white does makes a very smoothing effect on users.
· The colors that are used are nice and vary from category to category.
· The color theme is also consistent and hence not confusing when browsing through.
· There are sections to help box up different kinds of products that comes together with promotions.
· Same kinds of products are also displayed together as a cluster which make it very organized this enhances relevance when browsing through the site.
· The navigation through the site is also very simple and cognitive especially during the search or items that the users might want and the paying system.
· It is also very easy to go back to the previous categories that users have visited or to the home page.

5) Potential:
· We see a great potential in Amazon as it accepts a wide range of payment mode (American Express, Diners Club, Discover, JCB, MasterCard, Eurocard, Visa, Visa Check Cards, Amazon.com gift certificates, Amazon Credit Account, Webcertificates, and checks, money orders, traveler's checks, or cashier's checks denominated in U.S. dollars and drawn on a U.S. bank.) The above cards that are mention are common credit cards that most users will carry.

· With a constant update on the site users with new items or more promotions or even new functions, users that visit the site will never be bored or see old advertisements. This will keep the user interest and will keep coming back to see the latest updates and promotion that they can take advantage of.

6) Strength:
· Discussion Boards – This is where you post topics and chat with other Amazon reviewers and customers. There are guidelines to adhere to before you can post on the discussion boards. There are threads for frequently asked questions and bug reports. The boards are divided into sections for general, products and reviewing. The time is listed on the left side with the number of postings and which member started the thread. Many discuss their rankings as reviewers. You have the option of changing the color and size of the font in your posting. You get to preview your posting and can attach a file to it as well. This provides a good place for existing customers to exchange views on certain products and services provided to them.

· Help – This is divided into several sections – privacy & security, returns & replacements, ordering, shipping & delivery, selling, services and vendor guides. Everything is here but a live-chat option or their phone number. While in the help section user can also check whether the page is of helped or not and then get more options to fix the problem that you are experiencing.

· Shopping Cart – Amazon keep items here for a long time! I just found two books that I had placed there back on October 18, 2004 and they are sitting in my shopping cart. There are buttons to delete them or to move to cart. Basically they are saved items – to buy later, as the site states. In fact my last order was in April of 2005 and these items were not included in that order.

· Full refund within thirty days and exchanging incorrect and broken items based on terms and conditions is being practice which gives confidence to consumers who are skeptical about products before being delivered.

· Amazon has worked to protect the security of customers’ information during transmission by using a system called, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) software, which encrypts information after being entered.

· Only the last five digits of your credit card numbers are reveled when confirming an order. Of course, Amazon will transmit the entire credit card number to the appropriate credit card company during order processing to avoid errors during billing.

7) Weaknesses:
· When traffic is heavy it will tend to lag

· Shipping: Through forums and opinions of others who use the service of Amazon some commented that they encounter problems with receiving the shipment on time. Some however said that the items were sent to their address instead of somewhere else where they had specifically wrote and several phone calls had to be made to rectify the problem or the item had to be sent back to Amazon and then to the rightful place, which incurred shipping cost.

· International Shipping: There are items which could not be shipped to certain locations, due to weight limit. For example the track mill can only be delivered to specific states only. Another example is that books that are ordered cannot exceed the certain weight. Yet another one is the grocery products due to its freshness. This poses problem to consumers who sincerely want to acquire certain products that are available on Amazon website.

· We found that though Amazon is very informative and pictures are also there to enhance the marketing of the product, it tends to be too wordy on the front page.

8) Special highlights:
· Wish List – This is available in either a normal view or compacted view. The listing shows the date each item was added, the title, author if applicable, current price, new and used prices, link to the cart, how fast it will ship, whether it has been released (books). There is also a priority system that allows users to rate from 1-5 on the items that are on the wish list. This would be beneficial if users are sending their wish list to friends for holiday ideas, etc. The listing is 1- must have, 2 – love to have, 3 – like to have, 4 – I’m thinking about it or 5 – Don’t buy this for me. Customers can have more than one wish list. There is also an option to delete items from a wish list or to move them to another list. I have at times added an item to my wish list to find out that it had been there already. This will not show up a second time, but a notice saying it was already there. I wish there was an option to delete more than one item on a page of the wish list, but it goes quickly just the same.

· Friends and Favorites – Registered users can choose to add other customers of Amazon.com to be friends or favorites. A favorite would be those that you enjoy reading and want to be notified when they write a new review. A friend is someone who has access to your wish list and can send you items. If they make you a friend in return you can view their list and order them a gift for their birthday.

· Search Inside!™ Program – This function is application when customers purchase a book. It allows users to browse the first 30 pages or so that they have chose. This is a very useful as consumers can then make a better decision if they want to purchase the book or not.