EBay’s Mobile Computing

Running head: EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
EBay’s Mobile Computing
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EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
Introduction
E-commerce or electronic commerce can be defined as the activity of purchasing and
selling of products or services online. E-commerce is based on several other business
technologies such as mobile commerce, supply chain management, online money
transferring, online process and data interchange and many more (Laudon and Traver 2013).
This is turning out to become one of the most popular modes to conduct business of any form
of products or services. These business are generally classified into three variant forms
namely, business-to-business or B2B, Customer-to-customer or C2C and finally the most
commonly known model that is the business-to-customer or the B2C model (Chiu et al 2014).
This report will elaborate of the Business-to-customer model of e-commerce and drag
the reader’s attraction towards the case study of one of the largest e-commerce farm from all
over the world. The report will further describe their business process, their overall
background relating to the type of products or services that they offer to their customer and
would also analyse the mobile application that helps the customers to reach out to the
company. This would include detailed explanation of the architecture and the interface that
this mobile application provides. The e-commerce B2C business that has been chosen for this
case study is of EBay Inc (Gomez-Herrera, Martens and Turlea 2014).
Background
About eBay Inc.
EBay Inc. is one of the largest names when it comes to e-commerce business. EBay is
considered to be amongst the top multinational e-commerce companies due to their years of
services to people all around the globe. Based in San Jose, California, eBay provides both
customer to customer and business to customer services through their online presence.
Launched in 1995, eBay has grown since then to newer heights every summer. Now, eBay

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has more than a 150 Million people surfing through their products and services. Even though,
tons of other e-commerce business has flourished largely over the past two decades, but very
few could actually match the greatness of eBay. It is therefore, the critics arguably consider
eBay as the largest and the most popular online marketplace.
Business Strategy
“The world’s Online Marketplace”, this is what eBay holds as their motto since they
started with their business. It somehow critically identifies their moral and business
characteristics. The online marketplace that they offer is not bounded by any political or
geographical boundaries. They trade with their customers across all forms of borders. This
form of national and international trade has enhanced the growth of a diverse loyal
community for the business organization, from all over the world. EBay has enabled
thousands and may be millions of small businesses all around the world to start off their
journey and gradually flourish. Reports speak that over 430,000 people in the United States
of America make their living off selling new or used items through eBay. EBay thrives to
make every individual a king of their own business. They carefully turns a probable C2C
business model into a much acclaimed business-to-customer process where every individual
seller is a represents their own business entity. These sellers are able to sell their products
through eBay either via fixed price rates or auction their items.
Once a customer is interested to buy the product and pays online through PayPal or
other financial terms, EBay collects the products from the seller and their logistic team
deliver the goods to the buyer.
One of the most important concept that eBay utilizes is that any legal article that can
be sold or purchased physically, can also be dealt with via the internet. The main strategies of
the business includes:

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 Setting up an insurmountable customer base that is loyal to their foundation and will
come back to buy for their products.
 They trusted on viral marketing and ceaseless attempts from their growing
competitors to advance in their venture for the first few years.
 Conducting business with relation to the modernizing nature of technological
advancements. Through this concept or strategy, eBay first adapted into using
websites for conducting their online business since its initiation and then they turned
onto mobile applications to carry forth the torch. The features and utilities of the eBay
mobile application shall be discussed in the section below.
Updating to the mobile application
The eBay application was first released for the iOS users in 2008. The business
stakeholders realised the immediate need to switch from their traditional website business
into the smartphone environment. They realized all the necessary changes that their business
could go through for their own betterment if they chose to avail the mobile application
services to spread their business among the mass. It is believed that a smartphone application
can help any business organization to build a strong and loyal customer -base. It is simply
because of the ease of access and other utility features. Moreover, mobile applications also
help a great zeal in the marketing of a business through the various real time tools that a
smartphone application can provide, both to the business and the customers.
The eBay Mobile Application
The eBay mobile application was made available to the public through the Apple
iTune app store in the mo9nth of July, 2008. It was initially made available only to the
selective states of the United States of America where they could provide their best of
services to the customers. This went on as testing launch for the company. They knew that