EBAY: About the Company, Operations, and Customer Interactions

This document provides information about the company EBay, including its history, operations, and customer interactions. It discusses how EBay aims to meet customer needs and provides insights into its success strategies in delighting customers. The document also compares EBay with its competitors and highlights its unique features. Overall, it offers a comprehensive overview of EBay's business model and customer-centric approach.

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5/28/2019

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Contents
About the company EBay..........................................................................................................2
Ways in which EBay operates....................................................................................................2
 User accounts..................................................................................................................2
 EBay listings...................................................................................................................3
 Auction bids....................................................................................................................3
 Fixed price auctions........................................................................................................3
 New seller payments.......................................................................................................3
The Customer needs that eBay aims to meet.............................................................................3
Ways customers interact with eBay...........................................................................................4
EBay is successful in meeting the wants and needs of the customers by using various
strategies:....................................................................................................................................5
 EBay email campaigns....................................................................................................5
 Making the customers more valuable.............................................................................5
 EBay guaranteed delivery...............................................................................................5
Comparison of products with the competitors of eBay..............................................................6
Success strategy of eBay in delighting its customers.................................................................7
 Good Relationship management.....................................................................................7
 Customer service.............................................................................................................7
 Loyalty and pricing.........................................................................................................7
REFRENCES.............................................................................................................................8

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About the company EBay
It is an American company which is related to E-Commerce activities. it is based in
California. It is basically based on customer to customer business and business to consumer
sales by the use of website. It is also known as the auction web (Mandel, Rucker, Levav, and
Galinsky, 2017). The company was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995. EBay also has an
auction website under it which is famous worldwide and it is a free website for the buyers. It
revenue is around $14.07 billion and it earns profit around $2.60 billion every year. EBay
enables the commerce industry by providing malleable and scalable answers that helps in the
growth. EBay also helps in delivering the world with the world’s largest market place to the
customers which helps them to stay connected with the devices and helps them get the things
they need and love. The competitors of eBay are Amazon.com, Google, Ubid and Ebid
auction. EBay allow service which is global trading services. There are various ways through
which EBay advertises itself to the customers; it provides customers with EBay coupons,
EBay discounts, promotional codes, newspaper advertisements and social media marketing.
The competitors of EBay are Amazon, flipkart, Alibaba, Groupon, Le bon coin and price
minister.
Ways in which EBay operates
EBay is an online place that allows the buyers and the sellers to sell items online, any item
can be sold on the site it does not matter whether it is new or old. Seller can set the terms
and conditions of auction and include the shipment, return and payment options (Zhu,
Dholakia,., Chen, and Algesheimer, 2012).
 User accounts
EBay users can visit the site with or without logging in. In order to sell or to bid the
items one has to be registered with EBay. The registration with EBay is free of cost.
 EBay listings
Sellers can also create their lists for selling the items s they wish to sell. Anyone with
an account on the site of eBay can sell items on eBay easily. There is a sell option on
the site which takes the seller directly to the listing creation template.

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 Auction bids
Customers can search for the items they wish to purchase and contact the dealer
before putting the bid. Once the bid is placed it means that the person has accepted on
buying the product if he/ she turn out to be the highest bidder.
 Fixed price auctions
EBay also offers this option in which it offers options for fixed price which is marked
with “buy it now” sticker in such cases the seller sets a fixed price for the item and
also shows the total number of items available. After clicking on the purchase the
payment information is entered and once the payment us allowed the seller allows and
then ships the item (Zhu, and Zhang, 2010).
 New seller payments
This is for the new sellers. If there is a new seller in EBay they expect to hold on to
the payments of PayPal. PayPal hold the funds which are received from the buyers
from anywhere around the world between 3 to 21 days. This is done by eBay motivate
and protect the buyers. The sellers with no rating or low ratings are often the target of
this system.
The Customer needs that eBay aims to meet
Most of the customers buy stuff like laptop, IPods and mp3, clothing and accessories,
television sets and other television and merchandising goods. The demand at eBay is less
during the start but it increases after a period of time. EBay tries to study the market and
takes continues feedbacks from the customers in order to meet the needs of the customers.
EBay also meets the demands of the customers as it listens to the customers, it listens to each
and every small complaint done by the customers as this helps them to know where to
improve (Zhang, and Benyoucef, 2016).
Mostly customer needs good quality products and a good customer service from the company
and that is what EBay aims to meet. Good quality products are important to the customers as
they need best and nice products in fewer prices. Apart from customer service is another main
factor that the customer wants after and before buying the product as they can need help any
time and EBay should aim at supporting these needs of the customers at the highest priority.

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Ways customers interact with eBay.
Customers wants EBay to provide good customer service, EBay aims to deliver a worthy
customer facility to the customers in order to keep the customers loyal and happy. Nowadays
a good customer service support is all that a customer wants as they want the company or the
brand to listen to them and solve the issue as soon as possible, the customers do not like
waiting for anything they like to resolve the issue when it occurs and they expect full support
from the company and the brand in such cases.
EBay has a corporate culture that has knowledge to listen to the customers. EBay believes
that only the CEO decisions are not enough and that is the reason that EBay makes sure that
the company does not forgets its vision and that is the reason that the employees of EBay are
given opportunity to attend the training in call centres for 2 days. This helps them to learn
how to listen to the customers and this helps them to build the strategies accordingly.
EBay makes personal interactions. If the self-service FAQs of EBay are not able to solve the
issues or problems of the customers the EBay has an option of reaching to the customers.
Customers have an option of getting support from the customer service 24/ 7. EBay is able to
track the unattended calls of the customers and then they call and try to solve their issue on
their own (Weiss, Fulford-Jones, and Volpe, 2017).
Ways eBay succeed in meeting the needs and wants of people
EBay is successful in meeting the wants and needs of the customers
by using various strategies:
 EBay email campaigns
According to a study if someone has an eBay account and have looked at a product
than eBay sends them an email afterwards showing the same product or similar thing
 Making the customers more valuable
EBay conducts a form of customer DNA which gives them information as to which
customer is the most valuable to them. And through this study they also saw that
seller send way more than the customers and that is why eBay started new strategy in
which it aimed at changing the buyers into sellers and thus it started offering them
incentives of $50 for selling the first item (Guo, Wang and Leskovec, 2011).

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 EBay guaranteed delivery
EBay has started with its guaranteed delivery in order to compete with Amazon prime
services. EBay has also lower down their barrier to enter eBay as they want to offer
sellers a good experience and by this activity any qualified seller automatically enrols
to the site in order to be a qualified seller for the eBay guaranteed delivery the seller
must offer the following things
a) Same day or one day handling
b) Should use the qualified shipping methods
c) Should provide Zip code for the location of the item
d) Should have track record of handling the items and also uploading the
information about the tracking details (Chaudhry and Stumpf, 2011)
Comparison of products with the competitors of eBay
The products offered by EBay are:
a) Electronics- cameras, cell phones and PDAs, computers
b) Collectables- antiques, arts, coins, toys and dolls
c) Memorabilia motor vehicles- cars, boats, parts
d) Accessories- books, clothing, jewellery, shoes, décor, crafts , gardening
e) Entertainment- movies, music, games, CD, VHS, Event tickets
EBay is e-commerce Company which is an online shopping site and it provide the customers
with a chance to browse the products online (Van Der Heide, Johnson, and Vang, 2013).
EBay is very different from the other companies in terms of the products and the services the
business model and pricing, one of the main competitor of EBay is amazon. Amazon and
eBay provides same kind of products both the sites provide electronics, women and men
clothing, accessories, makeup and etc. but there are certain things that are different in eBay
which are that the seller can directly sell on the site and secondly eBay has option for
auction as well these two things are not available on amazon. In order to sell on amazon
there is a long procedure to follow (Hong, and Cho,2011).
Auction on EBay is something which is not available on any other site and it gives a lot of
services to the customers. Sometimes people sell their used antique things on the site through
the auction service and earn a lot.

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Success strategy of eBay in delighting its customers
 Good Relationship management
EBay does not have a good loyalty program but it does have a good customer
relationship management strategy. It minimizes the want and need of human support
by allowing the customers to contact the customer support service anytime. EBay
aims at protecting its customers and it also provides the sellers and buyers with
loyalty incentives. The main advantage of EBay is that the fees of it are much lower
than amazon and it has low prices for the customers and high margins for the sellers.
All these things keep the customers happy and loyal to the brand (Blake, Nosko, and
Tadelis, 2016)
 Customer service
EBay has an outstanding customer service, it has developed a large range of tools that
are really helpful for the customers to track the packages, return and exchange the
ordered items. EBay offers a very simple and good shopping experience to its
customers. This is one of the main success factors of EBay (Budiharseno, 2017)
 Loyalty and pricing
EBay offers various benefits like fast delivery and this is the main key to the success
of eBay and this is also one of the main reasons behind people buying product from
amazon. The pricing of the products are also low as compared the other sites (Hiscox,
Broukhim, and Litwin, 2011).

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REFRENCES
Blake, T., Nosko, C. and Tadelis, S. (2016) July. Returns to consumer search: Evidence from
ebay. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (pp. 531-
545). ACM.
Budiharseno, R.S. (2017) Factors affecting online buying behavior on g-market site among
international students in Busan: A qualitative research. Arthatama: Journal of Business
Management and Accounting, 1(1), pp.1-5.
Chaudhry, P.E. and Stumpf, S.A. (2011) Consumer complicity with counterfeit
products. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 28(2), pp.139-151.
Guo, S., Wang, M. and Leskovec, J. (2011) June. The role of social networks in online
shopping: information passing, price of trust, and consumer choice. In Proceedings of the
12th ACM conference on Electronic commerce (pp. 157-166). ACM.
Hiscox, M.J., Broukhim, M. and Litwin, C. (2011) Consumer demand for fair trade: New
evidence from a field experiment using eBay auctions of fresh roasted coffee. Available at
SSRN 1811783.
Hong, I.B. and Cho, H. (2011) The impact of consumer trust on attitudinal loyalty and
purchase intentions in B2C e-marketplaces: Intermediary trust vs. seller trust. International
Journal of Information Management, 31(5), pp.469-479.
Mandel, N., Rucker, D.D., Levav, J. and Galinsky, A.D. (2017) The compensatory consumer
behavior model: How self-discrepancies drive consumer behavior. Journal of Consumer
Psychology, 27(1), pp.133-146.

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Van Der Heide, B., Johnson, B.K. and Vang, M.H. (2013) The effects of product photographs
and reputation systems on consumer behavior and product cost on eBay. Computers in
Human Behavior, 29(3), pp.570-576.
Weiss, E.H., Fulford-Jones, T.R. and Volpe, A., SERVICE MANAGEMENT GROUP Inc,
(2017). Electronically capturing consumer location data for analyzing consumer behavior.
U.S. Patent 9,589,270.
Zhang, K.Z. and Benyoucef, M. (2016). Consumer behavior in social commerce: A literature
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Zhu, F. and Zhang, X. (2010). Impact of online consumer reviews on sales: The moderating
role of product and consumer characteristics. Journal of marketing, 74(2), pp.133-148.
Zhu, R., Dholakia, U.M., Chen, X. and Algesheimer, R. (2012) Does online community
participation foster risky financial behavior?. Journal of Marketing Research, 49(3), pp.394-
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