Research on EBay

This research paper explores the architecture, opportunities, and challenges of EBay. It discusses the vast scale of the platform and its popularity among users. The paper also highlights some of the weaknesses of the platform, such as its vulnerability to fraud and data breaches.

Running head: RESEARCH ON EBAY
Research on EBay
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1Running head: RESEARCH ON EBAY
The e-commerce has been the most popular and effective way for buying and selling
products and services over the internet. Such website showcase thousands of products along
with details of the products with eye-catching price tags. The e-commerce websites not only
used by the customers to buy products, many SME also sell and promote their products in the
websites. Additionally, such websites also enables C2C and B2C e-commerce and ebay is
one of the biggest player in this game where not only does the common public have a way to
give-and-take surpluses, but businesses today can effectively improve online dissemination
centers to extend their range and evade distributors.
EBay is a multinational e-commerce corporation established in 1995 by the Pierre
Omidyar. It was first introduced as auction site. Later it evolves to a full-fledged e-commerce
website and gain popularity worldwide. Users can browse ebay.com to view products and
buy their desired product or post some item to sell. Users can pay though online or cash on
delivery by debit or credit cards. Like almost every e-commerce website it is also constructed
utilizing distributed object technology (Haucap & Heimeshoff, 2014). This is used to provide
high availability, high scalability and high performance. It is also required to store a huge
volume of data in their database and also must be respond quickly when respond needed.
Today, the eBay has more than 177 million registered user and they spend huge amount of
the time as it has become a popular destination for shopping on the internet. The charts shows
the count fo registered user against the years.

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Figure 1: Active user accounts in Million
Source: (Van Der Heide, Johnson & Vang, 2018)
Other than managing the vast amount of users they also deals with more than 44
billion sql execution every day, 100,000+ lines of code are added every two weeks, 30,000
software builds per week, 30 Software Architects in its employ, handles 4.4 billion API calls
per month, nearly 10,000 live applications and over 1 Billion photos. The above statics gives
the idea about enormous scale of the ebay platform and the key attributes necessary to launch
its high availability, manageability and most of all its scalability.

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Figure 2: overview of the ebay platform
As shown in the above diagram, the overview of the platform is very simple but
actually it is opposite of that as the architectural design is also based on the system
architecture along with the software architecture. It is because in their platform not only web
clients and web server is involved, transaction servers, proxy servers, application server,
security server, and database. An architectural diagram is shown in the figure 3 which has 3-
tier along with web-enabled browser, database, and transaction and application server layer.
The relationship among the tiers are also established as well.
Figure 3: ebay architecture
Source: (Neto & Corbett, 2016)
There are also several component model as transaction servers, proxy servers,
application servers, security servers, databases, Web clients and web servers. Some of the key
attributes are explained. Firstly, web browsers for modifiability where end users interact with
the system and it supports wide variety of UI for different browser support and hardware as

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well. When users send request through their web browser, the request comes as https which
provide high security as users personal information along with the transaction details can be
stored on the requests (Kauffman & Chircu, 2013). HTTP is comprised with a sub protocol as
secure socket layer which enables secure exchange of commercial information. When user
send such request, it may reaches to the proxy servers first and data can be retrieved from the
proxy as such information can be retrieved from the browser cache. However, when buying
any item from eBay, real time respond is necessary. Next, the web server responds reaches to
destination which are web server. Web servers has the ability to dispatch and handle requests
while utilizing a poll of thread.
Even though eBay is one of the big ecommerce corporation in the current market,
they also faced some issue like controlling the shipping cost, credit card changes. MasterCard
or visa r instance, if fuel charges increases I different regions that could impact the price
factor for every product similarly if the transaction cost for online exchange is increased by
the master card and visa that will also impact the price rate (Hui et al., 2016). Today, the
eBay has more than 177 million registered user and they spend more a huge amount of the
time as it has become a popular destination for shopping on the internet.
Ebay also have some weakness as well as they are unable to identify the frauds and
vulnerability in their system. Their architecture is opened to third parties and several data
breach cases also came to light. The frauds are associated with counterfeit goods being
marketed to unsuspecting users. In 2014, 145 million users of ebay was notified to change
their password due certain cyber attack (Ye& Viswanathan, 2013). The attack was found by
the ebay when they found that some of the registered credentials are comprised. They notified
every customer to change their password. It is believed that the attackers wants to gain access
to the corporate network of ebay.

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There are several opportunities for the ebay to grow even more by adopting new business
strategy. Ebay increases their focus on the service provider in last years unlike Amazon.
Finally, it can be concluded that eBay has become one of the popular e-commerce
website. The e-commerce websites not only used by the customers to buy products, many
SME also sell and promote their products in the websites. Additionally, such websites also
enables C2C and B2C e-commerce and ebay is one of the biggest player in this game where
not only does the common public have a way to give-and-take surpluses, but businesses today
can effectively improve online dissemination centers to extend their range and evade
distributors. There are several opportunities for the ebay to grow even more by adopting new
business strategy as well.

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References:
Haucap, J., & Heimeshoff, U. (2014). Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay: Is the Internet
driving competition or market monopolization?. International Economics and
Economic Policy, 11(1-2), 49-61.
Van Der Heide, B., Johnson, B. K., & 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), 570-576.
Kauffman, R. J., & Chircu, A. N. (2013). Digital intermediation in electronic commerce: The
eBay model. In E-commerce and V-business (pp. 63-84). Routledge.
Neto, J. Q. F., Bloemhof, J., & Corbett, C. (2016). Market prices of remanufactured, used and
new items: Evidence from eBay. International Journal of Production Economics,
171, 371-380.
Hui, X., Saeedi, M., Shen, Z., & Sundaresan, N. (2016). Reputation and regulations: evidence
from eBay. Management Science, 62(12), 3604-3616.
Ye, S., Gao, G., & Viswanathan, S. (2013). Strategic behavior in online reputation systems:
evidence from revoking on eBay.
Liu, Z., Cao, Z., & Wong, D. S. (2013, November). Blackbox traceable CP-ABE: how to
catch people leaking their keys by selling decryption devices on ebay. In Proceedings

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of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security (pp.
475-486). ACM.