Ebay Information

Ebay 1. Company * Business model * Ebay History and Business Model * With more than 100 million active users globally (as of Q4 2011), eBay is the world's largest online marketplace, "where practically anyone can buy and sell practically anything" (eBay.com, 2012a). Founded in September 1995 by Pierre Omidyar in his San Jose living room (Bjornsson 2001) , eBay connects a diverse and passionate community of individual buyers and sellers, as well as small businesses. Their collective impact on ecommerce is enormous: In 2011, the total value of goods sold on eBay was $68.6 billion — more than $2,100 every second (eBay.com 2012). * * eBay is one of the notable success stories of the dot-com bubble, it is now a multi-billion dollar business with operations in over thirty countries. There is a strong company vision with a singular focus – that eBay is a company that’s in the business of connecting people, not selling things (Bjornsson, 2001). eBay has purchased PayPal, which enables individuals and businesses to securely, easily and quickly send and receive online payments. They also reach millions through specialized marketplaces such as StubHub, the world's largest ticket marketplace, and eBay classifieds sites, which together have a presence in more than 1,000 cities around the world (Shipman 2011). * “A good business model begins with an insight into human motivations and ends in a rich stream of profits” (Magretta 2002) * E-business modelling has similar goals to enterprise modelling in general. Modelling helps firms develop business visions and strategies, redesign and align business operations, share knowledge about the business and its vision and ensure the acceptance of business decisions through committing stakeholders to the decisions made (Persson & Stirna , 2001). Business modelling is simply the setup of a business and its network of partners for creating, marketing and supplying value and relationship capital to one or more