How to Buy and Sell on eBay

Selling Experiment in eBay

Essentially, a trading is an activity when two parties do some exchanges of goods or services on value that had been agreed by both sides. In the past, barter was the famous method to do trading. Over the times, money and currency were discovered, and then barter is not popular anymore. Nowadays, while the Internet technology has advanced rapidly and reliable, electronic trading has started to replace the physical trading market in over the world (Massimb & Phelps, 1994, p.39). This phenomenal has led many businesses to change their traditional business model to be more adaptable with electronic trading environment, from physical shop to be virtual shop. A company or seller is not only have to show their existence in real world, but also in the online networks. However, there are some differences between strategy in traditional market and online market place, eBay as an example.. Therefore, this essay will discuss any critical aspects that need to be considered to start online business in online market such as eBay.

eBay is an online platform which works as market place. On eBay, people can do both selling and buy at the same time. Also, there are many variations of item that can be sold and buy as well. The way eBay works is letting users do a C2C business model on their platform. They provide features that ease the users to do trading activities. Some powerful features of eBay are secure payment gateway, product listing and categories, search engines, bid and buy now method, and also user’s reputation. To experience the reliability of eBay from seller perspective, an experiment have been done. The experiment is regarding of how a user selling products in eBay, including the strategy to selling it f...

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Integrating with social media

As we know the social media has growth fast nowadays. Therefore, those product listings should be integrated more with social media such as Facebook or Twitter.

Better analysis of market competitor

The first selling experiment was lack of market competitor analysis. The seller failed to indicate who are the biggest competitors. Therefore, it led to lack of confidence in putting the price and it ends up by selling it almost 50% lower than the expected selling price.

Choosing better method of selling (auction or buy it now)

For the next business, it should be put more consideration how will it be sold. The first experiment has shown that by put two buying option, buyers preferred to bid it than buy it now.