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How eBay Uses Data and Analytics to Get Closer to Its Customer Base

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How eBay Uses Data and Analytics to Get Closer to Its Customer Base
3/20/2014

How eBay Uses Data and Analytics to Get Closer to Its (Massive) Customer Base | MIT Sloan Management Review

How eBay Uses Data and Analytics to Get Closer to Its (Massive)
Customer Base
Big Idea: Data & Analytics • Interview • June 25, 2013 • Reading Time: 11 min
Neel Sundaresan (eBay), Interviewed by Renee Boucher Ferguson

Online auction site eBay uses data about the behavior of its millions of customers to drive analytics at every level of the organization, and get closer to its customers.
You can find just about anything on eBay: A vintage BMW, a Lear jet, a

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half-million-dollar yacht. Or perhaps a domain name, industrial equipment, software and services from the likes of IBM, a food safari in
San Francisco. Or even a previously undiscovered species, such as
Coelopleurus exquisitus, a heretofore-unknown sea urchin sold on eBay.
The e-commerce giant has localized operations in over 30 countries, with 100 million registered users. The latest number of sellers listed by eBay in 2009 is well in excess of 1.5 million (it’s hard to tell the exact number of sellers, given buyers are often sellers and vice versa).
From all that activity stems a lot of data and, eventually, information — which eBay is capitalizing upon through the use of data analytics research. The results: eBay is much closer to its tremendous customer base than ever before, and it is able to iterate faster on fulfilling customer requirements.

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-ebay-uses-data-and-analytics-to-get-closer-to-its-massive-customer-base/

1/7

3/20/2014

How eBay Uses Data and Analytics to Get Closer to Its (Massive) Customer Base | MIT Sloan Management Review

In a conversation with MIT Sloan Management
Review contributing editor Renee Boucher Ferguson,
Neel Sundaresan, senior director of research at eBay discusses how the company uses data and analytics at every level to continuously evolve eBay’s numerous
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