An example of an E-Commerce success and its causes

Online shopping brings a lot of convenience to the consumers. In Malaysia, more and more people start to purchase something online such as clothes, electronic products or even pets. eBay offers boundless opportunity to allow people pursue their interests and their passions in the areas of their hobbies and their collectibles.

eBay has built an online person-to-person trading community on the Internet, using the World Wide Web. Buyers and sellers are brought together in a manner where sellers are permitted to list items for sale, buyers to bid on items of interest and all eBay users to browse through listed items in a fully automated way. The items are arranged by topics, where each type of auction has its own category. It's convenient and easy to be found by people. This facilitates easy exploration for buyers and enables the sellers to immediately list an item for sale within minutes of registering.

eBay has done a regular basis to promote eBay, they have had isolated campaigns through radio and print, and they've also done some tradeoffs and some banner ads on other sites. But the really unique thing about eBay is that when compare theirs to traditional businesses or other e-commerce sites, they have done very little external promotion to build membership.

Another cause has helped to make eBay as successful as it has been, is that people really enjoy the experience of the shopping bazaar. They enjoy looking around for merchandise. The other component is they really enjoy the competition of the bidding process. Everybody likes to get a bargain, and shape or form, likes to haggle a little bit over the price. eBay's auction format allows users to do that.


Obviously, people are becoming more and more comfortable with shopping online and they're getting more and more accustomed to doing that. That's another factor why eBay is grateful.


References:
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~magnus/ief248a/eBay/history.html