An example of an E-commerce success and its causes

An example of an E-commerce success is eBay. EBay is the world's largest online trading community. It is an American Internet company that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping web sites where people and businesses buy and sell goods and services in the worldwide. Besides its original U.S. web site, eBay has established localized web sites in other thirty countries.

There are many causes of success such as connection, experience of bargaining and building membership.

Connection enables individuals to connect and interact with one another. It can involve in market solutions, collaboration and wisdom of crowds. It also allows people to connect with some special early childhood memories. It could be anything from collecting baseball cards to toy soldiers to Barbie dolls to doll houses, and so forth. It also allows people to make that connection and relive a lot of those very vivid and very fond memories that they have from an earlier period of time.

People enjoy the experience of the shopping bazaar, the hunt and looking around for merchandise. The other component is that they really enjoy the competition of the bidding process. Everybody likes to get a bargain in some way and likes to haggle a little bit over the price. EBay auction format allows users to do that. The other thing is it has became a very practical place to buy and sell collectibles or commodities.

When compare eBay to traditional businesses or other e-commerce sites, eBay has done very little external promotion to build membership. EBay is a unique community that able to build membership through the word-of-mouth of users and also attract new members due to the amount of media attention. EBay is the first example where a commerce site has actually been built around a community where people are exchanging information, goods, services and merchandise. It's changed people because we have our share of hobbyists and collectors, but we have also learned that people who have established additional brick-and-mortar businesses are slowly moving a lot of that business over to eBay.