Online services Activity 12 visiting eBay (commerce)

The next activity I'm goin to look at is activity 12 where I have investigated eBay. The information for this is saved in word but also pasted into the blog below.

Who is the target audience?

The eBay website is aimed at potential buyers and sellers of pretty much any produce. It sells things in a range of categories including ‘Arts’, ‘Watches and Jewellery’, ‘Music’, ‘Photography’, ‘Antiques’ and many, many more. EBay is The World's Online Marketplace and it enables trade on a local, national and international basis. It has a diverse and passionate community of individuals and small businesses as well as offering an online platform where millions of items to traded each day. Hundreds of items are sold every hour and are sold on the highest bid basis.

How the auction process works

The auction process works by customers biffing on the items/items they wish to purchase. The auction is only open for a limited time and this varies from 1day up to 10days. In this time customers can either bid on the product or ‘watch the item’ until it comes closer to the end of auction. In many cases the number of people bidding at the end of the auction increases dramatically. If you successfully bid the highest price you have won the auction and are then given further instructions on how to pay.
An alternative buying method without bidding is clicking the ‘buy it now’ button. Often this does mean you may pay a slightly higher price for the item but in return you are assured that you will win the item and won’t loose out on it at the very last minute. Similarly to the auction method you are then given clear instructions on how to pay.

How well it fulfil its purpose and the limitations in place

I believe eBay serves its purpose very well and this is proved in the site being the world’s largest auction site. I serves it purpose by allowing customers to give there opinions on sellers and even buyers. This is known as feedback and allows people who miss treat the system or do something which may cause inconvenience to shame and allows future or buyers or sellers to find out this information before they commit to buy. Other restrictions that eBay implies to make sure that the purpose of the site is used to its full potential are warnings which are often given to known payers, feud restrictions so people can’t describe or upload false pictures of the items that they are selling.

What are the benefits of the service?

The main benefit of the service is that it is online and items can be bought without even leaving the home. It also means that items can b bought they maybe you can’t find anywhere else; a good example would be collectables or antiques which are rare. It can fetch enormous amounts of money particularly if they are products which people don’t particularly want. Another major benefit is the selling of 2nd hand goods which fetch large sums of money of which may have otherwise been thrown away if this service wasn’t available. As the marketplace is on such a large basis items can be sold worldwide and that is why items may fetch more money than they would elsewhere.