Word: marketing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What Johnson and other believers agree on is the wisdom of the company's relentless reinvestment in new markets in lieu of banking premature profits. Bezos' strategic analysis goes like this: customer acquisition is only going to get harder tomorrow, so you have to grab every customer you can today. For those 13 million customers translate into dominant market share. And dominant market share means the power, for instance, to strong-arm suppliers for better deals, which could lead to profitability. BMVP2000...
...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 on the Web, introduced its own auctions last year. (Yahoo's big selling point...
Global auctions are the kind of ideal market Adam Smith could only have dreamed of. Sellers are, at least in theory, guaranteed a price that isn't too low: they get to sell to the highest bidder anywhere in the world. And buyers are assured the price isn't too high because they get to choose the lowest one being offered by any seller in the world. Location becomes unimportant. You're not penalized for being a seller stuck in low-traffic, low-price Bismarck or a buyer shopping in high-cost Manhattan. Auctions also minimize transaction costs ("friction...
...more profound. Online auctions may destabilize the notion of a fixed price, leading buyers and sellers in all kinds of transactions to negotiate more over what items should cost. And they are likely to further erode the economic barriers between nations, speeding the way to a single world market. The full effects of eBay's hyperefficient, banish-the-middleman revolution haven't yet been felt, but one thing is clear: the pre-Internet model of buying and selling is going, going...
...hard it was to find other people to trade with in the San Francisco Bay Area. Omidyar was already an e-commerce pioneer (Microsoft eventually bought out eShop, a company he co-founded), but lately he had been wrestling with how the Internet could be used to create fairer markets. The Pez dilemma led Omidyar to the flash of an idea: an Internet auction site could function as the ultimate efficient market...