Word: ebay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Sharon Balkowitsch sold antiques from a stall in Bismarck, N.D., she was a victim of geography. There were few buyers in her hometown of 54,000, and prices were low. She started putting her wares up for auction on eBay last year and suddenly found herself part of the global marketplace. An Art Deco ashtray she bought for $20 was bid up quickly--and sold for $290. A vase she got for $5 went to a California buyer--for $585. She even sold an old tractor online--for $2,300, to a priest from New York. Checks have been...
Welcome to the eBay revolution. Auction sites are one of the hottest corners of cyberspace right now. Online bidders are eagerly competing for new ovens ubid.com and used microscopes going-going-sold.com) There are service auctions, where lawyers can underbid one another for assignments to register patents elance.com) and reverse auctions, where buyers name their own price for a ticket to Hawaii and airlines decide if they will go that low priceline.com) There are niche auctions for vintage surfboards webworldinc.com/vintage and movie memorabilia auction.newline.com) express auctions that wrap up in an hour onsale.com and auction sites where the proceeds...
...industry that's all of four years old, the dollar amounts are staggering: $4.5 billion in sales this year, and an estimated $15.5 billion by 2001. eBay is the dominant player in the online-auction world, with 7.7 million registered users bidding on some 3 million items. But other Internet heavyweights are hard at work trying to break off some of the market for themselves. Amazon.com added an auction site last spring. (It appears to be starting slowly; as of October, eBay had more than five times as many visitors as Amazon.com's auction site). Yahoo, the most visited site...
...named after Robert Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com Corp.): the value of a network increases by the square of the number of people on it. Every time a conventional online retailer adds a new user, it's just one more person who can buy its products. But every time eBay adds a new user, he can buy from or sell to any of the 7.7 million people already on the network. A retailer, in other words, is one to many, while eBay is many to many...
...online auctions are shaking up the way America does business. People are quitting their day jobs and finding they can support themselves entirely by selling on eBay and other auction sites. Traditional retailers are significantly augmenting their revenue by selling on eBay, and some are shutting down their stores entirely. Businesses that piggyback onto online auctions--insurers, shippers, escrow services--are booming. Offline businesses that compete with eBay--from antiques stores to classified-ad sections--are bracing for trouble...