bindCommerce allows you to automate the dialogue to and from eBay in a particularly effective way, both in the pre-sale phase and in the post-sale phase.
The most used features are the following:
- Download orders
- Publish listings at fixed price or in auction
- Modify, close and re-sell unsold products
Thanks to its modular structure, bindCommerce allows you to communicate with multiple eBay accounts, even in multiple markets (eg ebay.it, ebay.co.uk, ebay.com, ebay.fr, etc. .. .), keeping the stock availability automatically synchronized, The automatic procedures can for example close the adverts on ebay.com, ebay.fr and ebay.it if a product available in a single unit is sold on ebay.de or on an eCommerce store outside eBay.
An indispensable feature when you intend to start the management of an eBay account already in operation, is the download of the listings from eBay, in order to be able to "hook" them to the products (with the correspondence between the customized eBay tag and the product code), and therefore being able to update the listings without having to close them (as in this case it would incur loss of visibility of the same).
You can request that the initial configuration service be carried out on a project basis by the bindCommerce team. We invite you to contact us to find out more about your needs.
eBay, from the .net bubble to today
The running costs for a server in 1995 were not incredibly affordable compared to today, even in the face of reduced traffic. We are, on the other hand, at the roots of the digital age, in the Middle Ages of the web .
Financially supporting a website with sustained traffic in those years, meant investing a significant amount of money.
This was the content of the call that Pierre Omidyar made at the end of that year from his provider; if he wanted to keep AuctionWeb upright, a site that auctioned used, broken or disposed of items, he had to upgrade his subscription .
Omidyar accepted, by introducing a paid subscription on the site, to meet the costs. Users did not complain and continued to grow.
The dizzying growth
The following year, in 1996, the platform hosted over two hundred and fifty thousand auctions, underlining how "someone's discard could be someone else's treasure". In 1997 eBay exceeded two million auctions, proceeding after a few months to go public, exceeding fifty dollars a share. Omidyar and Skoll, newly hired company president, become billionaires .
The dot-com bubble
The dizzying growth of the company does not stop and continues undaunted, fully riding the wave of the dot-com bubble, the wild speculation bubble on the new online services and on the new mass of users that had access to these services.
eBay grows in this period and diversifies, having as objective to sell practically everything. When the bubble burst in 2002, many companies born on the wave of speculation collapse, others, such as Amazon and eBay , are only temporarily affected by the contraction of the market and their share value is still growing.
The acquisitions
At the end of the same year eBay completely absorbed PayPal (now back independent), making it one of its predefined payment methods and developing the digital money-transfer service that we know today.
In the years that followed, major acquisitions continued with Craig's List, Skype (now owned by Microsoft) and StubHub, among others.
How does it work?
Over time, the practices and functionality of the platform have expanded and evolved, but the underlying business model has remained the same and is based on two main elements: a fixed fee for professional sellers and a percentage on the sale price for all items sold through the platform.
The methods and percentages vary greatly based on numerous factors, the most relevant of which is the physical location of the seller and consequently the rules on taxation to which he must adhere.
What can be sold on eBay?
Anything that respects the terms and conditions of the company. With the exception of, for example, weapons, tobacconists or illegal adult material, the platform has hosted and hosted over the years practically all sorts of products.
Suffice it to remember that the first object ever sold through the site was a broken laser pointer, purchased by a collector of broken laser pointers.
Respecting the two main sales methods, "auction" or "buy it now", it is actually possible today to sell every type of product, physical or digital, and a wide variety of services. For example, you can buy on eBay likes for our Instagram page, as well as consulting services from IBM.
We can sell the old furniture that we no longer need, or even an entire website. There were also those who tried to sell your spouse particularly complaining, but for some reason the transaction did not end despite the auction's success.
eBay Today
Today eBay is one of the main competitors in the marketplace panorama, present in almost all over the world; for eBay, despite its pioneering role, it has proved impossible to penetrate in mass markets such as Chinese and Indian, dominated by very strong local realities.
In recent years the platform has expanded, absorbing ad sites, such as Kijiji and embracing the technological evolution brought by artificial intelligence; since 2017 it is in fact possible to search for a product on eBay by uploading its photo, similarly to Google's "search by image", using a complex machine learning mechanism.
Finding broken laser pointers has never been easier!
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