( copied from USA Today, because I love eBay and I am (if you did not know) an eBay vendor!)
"eBay tracks searched words, which in turn are indicative of what buyers are looking for. Word searches for all of 2002 reflect a society still spending freely. Among the top 10 searches for the year were BMW, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Coach.
Similar terms dominated the top 10 into early 2003, until August, when there was a sudden shift. The Iraq war was dragging on. Companies were still cutting jobs and keeping raises flat. The blackout hit. California was in political chaos with its recall vote. And just then the luxury names dropped off eBay's top 10, replaced by more mundane words such as Ford, Chevy and diesel.
In September, "salvage" made it to the top 10.
EBAY STATS (from USA Today)
9: Number of minutes between the sale of SUVs on eBay.
$18: Cost of an eBay share when company went public in September 1998. After splits, it's worth $760.32 as of Friday.
95: Percentage of eBay's sellers that are individuals or small businesses.
$729: Value of goods sold on eBay every second.
10,000: Number of people who visit eBay Motors every month.
19 million: Number of items on the site at any given time, more than 300 times the number of stock-keeping units in a typical Wal-Mart.
86 million: Number of registered eBay users in 2003. That is up 36% from the year before and almost on par with the population of Vietnam.
$6.7 billion: Value of cars, used and new, sold on eBay in 2003.
$20 billion: Dollar value of goods sold on eBay in 2003, $6.5 billion more than the annual revenue of Gap clothing stores.
$40.9 billion: EBay's market value as of close of market Friday. That is $11 billion more than the market value of 100-year-old Ford Motor.
Overall, the success of eBay itself says something about 2003.
First, it shows that the Internet revolution didn't end when the 2000 dot-com bubble burst. Sure, a lot of things didn't work and went under ”” Pets.com, online grocer Webvan. But businesses that made it are transforming markets.
Just look at what eBay and the Internet have done in 2003 to the $300 billion used car business. About $7 billion worth of cars, most of them used, will sell through eBay this year. About 30% of used cars will be sold on the Net. A market that used to be local has become national in a year or two.
The eBay concept is even transforming politics, as seen in the campaign of Democrat Howard Dean. "You can draw a clear connecting line from eBay to Google to the Dean campaign," says Steven Johnson, author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. "All are bottom-up systems organized by lots of individuals acting in small ways, as opposed to top-down systems where a small elite calls the shots."
As a company and phenomenon, eBay continued to grow in 2003. In 1998, its gross merchandise sales ”” the total value of all transactions ”” were $700,000. In 2000, at the height of dot-com mania, they hit $5.4 billion. This year? The number should pass $20 billion.
The stock market values the company at about $41 billion ”” about $11 billion more than the market value of Ford Motor. That says a lot about what society thinks of eBay and its future."
Leave a comment