Word: siting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...year since the IPO, eBay has hit a few speed bumps. The site has been plagued with headline-grabbing crashes, among them a 21-hr. outage in June, four more in July, and a 10-hr. shutdown in August that sent eBay stock plunging 10%. The stakes were higher than ever because the eBay staff was well aware that thousands of individuals outside the company--single mothers, disabled people, seniors--were supporting themselves by selling on eBay. "It was probably the single most stressful time we've had at eBay," says Skoll of the August crash. "Poor Meg would catch...
...more people flocked to eBay, the more it became the place to be. But the real genius of eBay is its success in building a community--"maybe the most real community on the entire Web," says Whitman. There's no question people like hanging out in eBayland. The site gets more than 1.5 billion page visits a month. And at a time when the Internet mantra is "stickiness"--how long users stay on a website--eBay is cyberspace superglue. Each visitor to Amazon.com spends an average of 13 min. a month on the site. On eBay, each visitor's monthly...
eBay is sticking with its core mission of consumer-to-consumer auctions but is also working to expand its reach dramatically. In October, eBay announced a new venture: eBay Great Collections, a new area on the site for antiques and fine collectibles. Along with the acquisition of Butterfield & Butterfield, the world's fourth largest auction house, Great Collections marks a move by eBay into the high-end market. (The average sale on eBay is currently about $40.) eBay has also begun rolling out local eBays, starting with eBay Los Angeles. The idea is to provide a local market...
eBay's most ambitious undertaking right now is its drive to go international. It's a big enough priority that Omidyar has returned to his native France to help oversee the effort. eBay has always had a small percentage of overseas users logging into its U.S. site, but now it is aggressively moving into foreign markets. In June it purchased Alando.de--Germany's equivalent of eBay--and folded it into the eBay site. The company also has sites running for the U.K., Canada and Australia. eBay is far ahead in those countries but vulnerable in places where it is less...
Omidyar had a typical programmer's view of the Net. He saw it as a freewheeling, authority-defying medium, and he was proud of his fledgling site's noncorporate orientation. "The first commercial efforts were from larger companies that were saying, 'Gee, we can use the Internet to sell stuff to people,'" he says. "Clearly, if you're coming from a democratic, libertarian point of view, having corporations just cram more products down people's throats doesn't seem like a lot of fun. I really wanted to give the individual the power to be a producer as well." eBay...