Word: auctions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Forget about black monoliths. If the late great Stanley Kubrick had known what was going to be really cool by the year 2001, his seminal movie would have opened with 25 million ape-descendants clustered silently round an awe-inspiring and somewhat unreal auction house. Then to the tune of the Blue Danube, some bizarrely diverse items would shoot weightlessly through the ether - sterling silver Jaguar cars, Sherlock Holmes first editions, Xerox networked printers, a pair of Madonna concert tickets, an ostrich-egg incubator - moving at a rate of 5 million purchases per day. The climactic scene, perhaps, would feature...
...unreal auction house in question is, of course, eBay, which is in many ways the most powerful pure-play Internet force on planet Earth in 2001. It has recently become the top e-commerce destination, growing at a rate of roughly 1 million users per month. While its brethren in the legendary website club (namely Yahoo! and Amazon.com) suffer alarming slowdowns in growth, eBay posts quarter after quarter of stunning profits (its latest: $21 million, an increase of more than 150% on the same period last year...
...seller. Price is determined by the number of buyers and how much they're willing to pay. Haggling is not only mandatory, it's automated. Sales have a deadline; everything must go. And most importantly the quality of the bazaar increases exponentially with its size. There are rival online auction services - Yahoo! and Amazon.com again - but eBay still has the lion's share of the market, about 85%. Put simply, it maintains the lead because it has the lead. If you're a seller, there's nowhere better...
...granny, go! COURTNEY WALSH Keep the cucumber sandwiches coming. The West Indies cricketer is the first bowler to take 500 wickets in Test history JACK KEROUAC Beat this. The wire-service paper roll on which On the Road was written is expected to fetch more than $1 million at auction...
...students expect the campaign's cash cow will be an auction to be held next Tuesday at the Watergate Hotel in Washington...