BCO6185 Mobile Computing: EBay's B2C App, Architecture & Benefits

This case study examines eBay Inc.'s successful implementation of a business-to-customer (B2C) e-commerce model through its mobile application. It provides background information on eBay's business strategy and its evolution from a website-based platform to a mobile application. The study details the features of the eBay mobile application, including its search functionality, user account management, activity tracking, and item categorization. It further explores the application's architecture, business processes, and the benefits it has brought to both the company and its users, such as increased reachability, customer loyalty, and revenue growth. The case study also touches on the security measures implemented by eBay and PayPal to ensure secure online transactions.

Running head: EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
EBay’s Mobile Computing
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

1
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

2
EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
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:

3
EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
 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

4
EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
once the application is out in the market, their business demands shall automatically take a
steep rise. Later that year, they released their application based services in Canada, Australia
and in Europe. Now, the eBay application has been released on the android platform as well,
in addition to a global release for the iOS platform back in the year 2010.
The features of the mobile application include the following:
 The search bar on the eBay application allows the users of the application to search
for any product right away. The user is free to search for their requisites and the
application will take the user to the respective product listing for them to choose the
right option (Dalmasso et al 2013).
 The application allows the users to sign up into their own eBay account and save and
proceed with their buying or selling over the application. This was formerly known as
their My World Avatar feature, which is now a very common feature for any sort of
online profile based services. This option allowed the user to setup their own identity
online with preferably their identity details and a picture to identify them or represent
the business that they uphold (Behance.net, 2018).

5
EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
 Pages.ebay.in, (2018), says that the application has a very unique feature through
which the users can view how many co-users from all around the globe are viewing
that particular product at the4 same point of time. This is known as the ‘Activity on
watched items’ feature. This was one of the patent features that eBay had introduced
long back and is now used by many start-ups. This helped the business in a lot of
ways, details of which will be presented in a later section of the report.
 Categorizing of items is another very important feature that eBay has used in its
smartphone application. Through this feature, the users are allowed to view their
products and the business modules are allowed to view their auction details and
listings in a more customized and categorized manner (Trotman, Degenhardt and
Kallumadi 2017). The customers will be able to choose the category of products that
they are looking for and can also mention the price range and or other characteristic
details in their products and the application would carefully present the products in
the requested manner. Sellers can benefit by categorizing auction styles and fixed-
price listings and plan through with their own business strategies.

6
EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
 As for the business perspective, the company, through the mobile app allows the
sellers to update price and quantity of the goods that they wish to sell. They can
choose whether to sell their products at a fixed rate or auction the same (Alhazzaa
2014).
 The application also allows the users to view full-scale images of the products
alongside detailed description of the product and the seller that they are buying form.
They are given the opportunity to multi-touch on the screen to zoom into the interface
and read the details with better visibility. The figure below shows the product card of
the eBay application with all details about the product.

7
EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
 Niranjanamurthy (2014), says that the online payment feature of eBay has given rise
to one of the largest online money transaction farms in the world, PayPal.
 The EBay application ensures that their users can trust them with the data that they
levy. The application makes use of trusted algorithms and technologies in order to
ensure a secured environment for business transactions to take place. PayPal also
makes sure that the online money transactions are carried on with utter security
(Niranjanamurthy et al 2013). Online help modules are also available within the
application.

8
EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
Application Architecture
Initially developed and released for the iOS phones only, the eBay applications is now
available for download to the general mass all over the world for the android community as
well. The application uses the LCD display of the mobile phone as the only interface of
communication with the user. However, the user can also choose to scan product barcodes or
upload product images onto the application using their mobile camera.
Even though the application is meant to perform differently from the actual eBay
website, however, they use the same back-end database. Any update made to the eBay server
database will affect the product listings and operations on both the applications and the
website concurrently. This allows the operations to be synchronous and robust in nature. The
notification system of the application is believed to be one of the game changing advantages
of adapting to the mobile platform. Customers and business individuals are notified at real
time whenever there is an update regarding a particular purchase of sale of a product
respectively.
The eBay application is lightweight and is destined to run on mobile phones of any
hardware specifications. It just needs to fulfil the desired OS requirements of the application.
Business Architecture
The application has all the necessary options for a seller to list one or more of his
items on the eBay website for the buyers to buy. Once a buyer purchases the product and the
payment is made, the seller or the business representative is required to ship the product
within 3 business days, the application notifies the buyer that the product will be delivered
within the next 7 days. Once the product safely reaches the buyer and the complete
transaction process is complete, eBay pays back the seller with their earned half.

9
EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
As for eBay being the host for the B2C transactions to take place, the application has
a lot to offer to the parent organization. The application increased the reachability of the
application considering the modern business environment. As mentioned earlier, this helped
the company to gain millions of loyal customers and sellers into their business system. The
notification feature of the application alongside the ‘Activity on watched items’ option
allowed the business to increase their sales exponentially. EBay’s revenue had doubled from
a 8 billion dollars mark to a whopping 13 billion US Dollars within one year of their
modernized update to their mobile application in the year 2012. It must be mentioned that in
2013, eBay’s PayPal contributed to about 41% of eBay's net annual revenues. More than 27
billion dollars of that amount came in the form of mobile payments. This was a significant bit
of growth in the business, which was approximately a cent percentage than the previous year
(Marketwatch.com, 2018).
Conclusion
It can hence be concluded that the adaption to a mobile application certainly helped
eBay to conduct and spread their booming business across all seas. The company made sure
that they stuff down every possible functional requirement into their application to provide
their customers and sellers the best of user experience. The financial advancement that the
application brought into the company was also a listing feature that can highlight the
importance of this case study. This case study elaborately represents the use of a mobile
application in order to completely turn the face of e-commerce business.

10
EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
References
Alhazzaa, T., 2014. Saudi eBay Project: eBusiness, eCommerce and eAuction in Saudi
Arabia.
Behance.net. (2018). Behance. [online] Available at:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/33067895/Case-Study-eBay-Mobile-Experience-Redesign
[Accessed 28 May 2018].
Chiu, C.M., Wang, E.T., Fang, Y.H. and Huang, H.Y., 2014. Understanding customers'
repeat purchase intentions in B2C e‐commerce: the roles of utilitarian value, hedonic value
and perceived risk. Information Systems Journal, 24(1), pp.85-114.
Dalmasso, I., Datta, S.K., Bonnet, C. and Nikaein, N., 2013, July. Survey, comparison and
evaluation of cross platform mobile application development tools. In Wireless
Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), 2013 9th International (pp.
323-328). IEEE.
Gomez-Herrera, E., Martens, B. and Turlea, G., 2014. The drivers and impediments for cross-
border e-commerce in the EU. Information Economics and Policy, 28, pp.83-96.
Haucap, J. and Heimeshoff, U., 2014. Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay: Is the Internet
driving competition or market monopolization?. International Economics and Economic
Policy, 11(1-2), pp.49-61.
J.Gopalkrishnan V.K Gupta, (2018). eBay: “The world’s largest online marketplace”- A Case
Study. [ebook] Available at: http://dspace.iimk.ac.in/bitstream/handle/2259/42/543-549.pdf?
sequence=1&isAllowed=y [Accessed 28 May 2018].
Laudon, K.C. and Traver, C.G., 2013. E-commerce. Pearson.

11
EBAY’S MOBILE COMPUTING
Marketwatch.com. (2018). eBay Inc.. [online] Available at:
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/ebay/financials [Accessed 28 May 2018].
Niranjanamurthy, M., 2014. E-commerce: Recommended online payment method-
Paypal. International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile Computing, pp.669-679.
Niranjanamurthy, M., Kavyashree, N., Jagannath, S. and Chahar, D., 2013. Analysis of e-
commerce and m-commerce: advantages, limitations and security issues. International
Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering, 2(6).
Pages.ebay.in. (2018). Using eBay mobile apps. [online] Available at:
https://pages.ebay.in/help/account/mobile.html [Accessed 28 May 2018].
Trotman, A., Degenhardt, J. and Kallumadi, S., 2017. The Architecture of eBay Search.
In Proceedings of the SIGIR 2017 Workshop on eCommerce (ECOM 17).
Veit, D., Clemons, E., Benlian, A., Buxmann, P., Hess, T., Kundisch, D., Leimeister, J.M.,
Loos, P. and Spann, M., 2014. Business models. Business & Information Systems
Engineering, 6(1), pp.45-53.