What is ebay

It is an online shopping site that functions as both a business to consumer E-tailing enterprise and a consumer to consumer E-tailing business. It was popular around the period of the Dot-com rave and had ever since remained in our faces. The shopping site has created a niche for itself within the industry with its auction deals. The e-commerce store has driven sales and patronage from all around the world since its inception.

It was one of the pioneers of the e-commerce move. One of the primary reasons it was able to achieve this is the fact that it operates as an online marketplace. It is open for operation across many countries, although some states do not have access restricted from buying or selling on the platform.

The multinational eBay Inc. It is located in San Jose, California. The e-commerce marketplace was able to gain brand awareness and patronage as a result of the fact that it meets one of the pertinent needs of buyers, and provides an ease to sellers as they sell.

They keyed into the trending need to want to buy different products at one location to cut out time-wasting, and they did right with it. Buyers flooded the platform for the value of convenient purchase that characterizes sales on eBay. While in the case of sellers, eBay made selling attractive to all. There was a lot of selling going on, and just about anything was being sold.

Sales on the platform became interesting; everyone started selling off items they did not need as the market was also available. Another point that stood eBay out among other e-commerce platforms is the trust that buyers will always have for marketplaces where there is a high rate of competition, multiple choice of sellers, and reasonable prices.

These endeared eBay to buyers as against single stores that lacked all of these features. This drove sellers to the platform to gain recognizability, and trust of customers before they now get into their digital stores.

Buyers then place bids on the item. When the listing ends, the buyer with the highest bid wins. Trading on eBay is easy and it's fun! Best of all, you'll never know what you can find.

Have a question? We can help. Contact us. Get help from other eBay members. Visit the Answer Centre to post a question. Skip to main content. Browse help. You may recall when the Hostess factories shut down, and Twinkies were temporarily discontinued? Savvy eBay sellers bought them up and sold them on eBay for a premium. It is all about supply and demand.

Some other interesting items that sold for a premium on eBay over the years include:. You can get just about anything imaginable on eBay even when the item isn't readily available in a brick an mortar store locally. Back in September , Pierre Omidyar launched a site called Auction Web, which would evolve to be the eBay we know today. He had no idea that his original concept would explode into something that is now a household word.

Today, eBay is the go-to place for collectors. There are millions of items available for purchase every day for every kind of collector in over countries around the world. And we aren't just talking about baseball cards, coins, and stamps. Some items that collectors love to buy on eBay include:. Collectors love eBay because of the availability of items, advanced search and notification systems, the variety of items, ease of purchase, recourse through eBay and Paypal if the transaction isn't right, and user-friendliness of the site.

A collector can spend hours on eBay browsing items, adding them to his watch list, bidding, making offers, or just considering what to buy next. Millions of tons of goods that would otherwise go into landfills or more resource-intensive recycling programs instead find new homes every year thanks to eBay.

Some of these goods include consumer electronics items like computer parts and mobile phones that release toxic substances once they're discarded and exposed to the environment. Other items like clothing, toys, office supplies, home decor, and textiles find new homes and are kept in circulation rather than dumped in the trash.