eBay’s Sales Records Help Develope the Market
Forget miracle medicines, advanced aeronautics or genetically modified crops. When it comes to business research, the biggest laboratory in the world isn’t at Pfizer, General Electric or Monsanto. It’s online, at eBay.com, where everyone from university scholars to conventional retailers are carefully studying the auctions of baby pajamas, home board games and other items to better understand consumer behavior.
What makes eBay so fascinating?
In part, it’s sheer size. In the first three months of this year, the company had 75.4 million active users, up 25 percent from last year.
Some $12.5 billion changed hands through the site, a gain of 18 percent. This year, eBay is poised to surpass $50 billion in sales.
Even more important, though, is transparency. Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and other retailers guard the details of their pricing and transactions like state secrets. But eBay, while protecting its users’ personal privacy, sells facts about its auctions to companies that use the information to try to make sense of consumer behavior and tastes, marketing strategies and why one color iPod or a certain style of walking shoe outsells its rivals.
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