eBay, an online auctioning community
http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/bidding-overview.html
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/formats.html#auction
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/eBay.com
People sell and buy things every day. Commerce is one essential way people today interact with one another. In today’s digital world people use online sources to browse items to select the one they most desire. These online-stores have become wide-spread in today’s society. Almost every brand name store has an online shop. There are also internet sites which allow people to sell and buy their own goods. One in particular is eBay. EBay has becoming one of the nation’s most popular sites for buying and selling goods. One particularly interesting thing about eBay is that eBay allows one to auction off items. Auctioning is a much less restrictive way to buy an item, because the price is not fixed.
There are many types of auctions, but the ones on eBay run under a proxy bidding system. This means that people bid on the item and the price of that item ascends, until there are no more bidders, which is when the highest bidder wins the auction and has to pay the price of the second highest bidder plus one additional increment bid. The interesting thing about eBay is even if the seller is doing an auction-style listing, he has the option of putting up a Buy It Now price, which can allow buyers to simply buy the item at the price which the seller thinks is appropriate. Auctioning in many cases is fun, because in an auction there is a balancing act and a tug-of-war feel with the other buyers, where people try to bid at the right price.
It is clear that eBay is one of the best sites to go for an online-auction because of its statistics. According to the Alexa Traffic Report for eBay, it has the 7th rank for most online traffic in the auction category of sites. The way eBay as a company makes money is by charging fees to post a product and to collect a fee when it sells. Essentially eBay provides the seller with platform to sell his product. This is one of those companies which gain more prestige as more the company gains more users, similarly to that of Facebook.
-kk537