My Ebay Experience

There’s a relatively new presence in the Philippines’ e-commerce universe ---- eBay (Ebay Philippines was launched in the country in year 2004.)

After surfing through their website, I can say that the scope and scale of Ebay's services are awesome.

I admire the way they are constantly upgrading operations and adding additional services. And most of all I like that they are adding new divisions.

Being a new "fan", I recently bought a book on eBay entitled the “Perfect Store.”

Did you know that eBay was a brainchild of a computer geek named Pierre Omidyar ?

Pierre's vision was to create efficient markets. He was thinking of a public forum that could enable to interact based on commerce. “In a public forum, honest dealings are encouraged, and despite the fact that buyers and sellers are strangers, the system helps support trust.”

What actually happens on the platform?

According to Andre Haddad, vice president of eBay user experience and design and former eBay managing director for France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium, a tractor or tractor part sells every hour. “A video game sells every eight seconds. An IBM laptop is sold every 3.5 minutes. A digital camera sells every minute. And trading cards sell every six seconds.”

Isn’t that amazing ?!

Haddad said that there are two extremes thinking that eBay is a retailer and thinking that it's a marketplace in which there's no human intervention. Truth is eBay is a marketplace manager.

”Think about eBay as a neighborhood marketplace.”, he said,”It's at the intersection of commerce and community. Interactions are personal. eBay works at the tale end of the product lifecycle: collectibles and extremely new and scarce products.”

What makes eBay attractive to ordinary people? What drives the experience?

The framework's roles, policies, pricing, and education provide clear guidelines for trade. Ebay culture celebrates the community, listens, learns, and involves users in all steps of product development.

Where in the world can you find an organization where "the community" is king? Many users constantly provide.eBay with unsolicited comments and suggestions to improve site operations. And this is the only e-commerce site, I know, where people hang out to socialize while talking shop.

Take note, there are 400,000 people who work full time out of their homes making a living on eBay. The buying experience also brings a joy of discovery and excitement. "Winning or losing an auction at the very last minute is a very human experience. And the community experience encourages interaction and communication.”

After reading through my new book, I decided to take the plunge into the world of auction bidding. While searching for what to buy on eBay, someone suggested books.

I found someone online that sold a few I liked. I discovered the "feedback rating" system and checked out the seller. At the time he had been selling on eBay for about two years and had about more than 100 positives. Not bad I thought.

I bought one inspirational book for around P200 and paid by depositing in seller’s bank account.

Interestingly I emailed the seller before the purchase to "kinda" feel her out. In each case she replied promptly. "Good" I thought. The next day I got my package. I was impressed by the speed of delivery.

Ebay’s feedback rating system is not a perfect system since anyone can complain about anything but it has its merits.

Today, when I search for people to do business with, I check how long they have been selling at the auctions. I check how many negative feedbacks they have received and sometimes I check to see how they responded to the negative complaints. It is not foolproof but it works fairly well.

I tend to search out Power Sellers more often. Power Sellers have a lot to lose and they are very diligent in answering emails and mailing products promptly. Sometimes it's easy to find their physical address and their telephone/cellular phone numbers. This tends to increase "trust" and lower the fear/risk involved in buying from strangers.

It's seems funny how much we at the agency try so hard to encourage local businessmen to get involved in e-commerce, instead of just settling for brick-and-mortar type of stores. We keep trying to convince these traditional businessmen that they can find more buyers by also going online...yet we get a cold, uninterested response or they grudgingly set up a static site or join a free site installed by a foreign donor... all of which do not fully satisfy their business needs.

Now here comes an e-commerce organization that effortlessly and successfully encourages ordinary people, who don't even look like businessmen, to export products to other countries from home.

My point is... there may be a lot of small local "exporters" we don't know existed who are already doing business in the cyber market. And that eBay may know something we don't... . the right formula to a successful online business.