eBay here, eBay there, eBay everywhere...

[mandy]

eBay needs to move beyond its own site not just because that's where shoppers are. So are its merchants. Some of its most successful sellers have moved on to sell items through their own storefronts, using Google's search advertising platform to drive traffic to those sites. They don't stop selling on eBay, but they begin giving the site less of their premium merchandise and more of the kinds of items they're willing to sell at a bargain. "As sellers mature, eBay goes from their channel of first resort to their channel of last resort," says Wingo.

To avoid becoming a bargain basement, eBay has to encourage sellers to keep listing more of their higher-end inventory on the site while attracting more young businesses. Better merchandise brings in more buyers which, in turn, attracts more sellers. EBay can also kick-start the cycle by attracting more buyers through efforts such as eBay To Go and the Facebook integration. "They should be aggressively going after the people who don't have online businesses yet," says Tim Boyd, an analyst at American Technology Research Inc.

Grabbing buyers, as well as business, outside of eBay's core shopping platform will be a significant challenge. Competition on the Web is fierce, and eBay must contend not just with other e-commerce companies looking for buyers' and sellers' business but also with myriad Web entertainment and social sites seeking to grab their time. ...

full article: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/con...op+stories

[mandy]

A related article:

-Today at the eBay Developers Conference in Boston, eBay Inc. released a series of new services and platform enhancements to help developers, affiliates and entrepreneurs extend eBay content anywhere that people are connected...

The new services include:

    * eBay Shopping Web Services: a suite of faster, more responsive APIs that makes searching on eBay up to 16 times faster and allows developers to easily create buying applications
    * eBay Bidding API: qualified developers can enable bidding on eBay from anywhere
    * eBay Client Alerts: lightweight, near real-time alerts about platform activity
    * New JavaScript and Flash Developer Centers: making it easier for JavaScript and Flash developers to access the eBay Web Services platform
    * New Production Call Plan: access to API calls in the production environment raised from 10,000 per month to 150,000 per month, allowing new developers to rapidly scale up their applications

full press release: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m06/i11/s05