Started as a sole proprietorship in 1995, EBay has grown into a gigantic online auction house. The company itself doesn’t sell anything; instead, users join (the membership is free) and list items for sale for very small fees. EBay’s money is made from the nickel-and-dime insertion and listing fees; they also charge a commission at the end of the sale.
This site would have been useless without people to offer products and other people to bid on them. Instead, it’s one of the biggest sites on the Internet. Users are “rated” by those who do business with them. If a person tends to list items for sale and not deliver, or if he’s slow in shipping, buyers can readily find this out before placing a bid.
Some EBay users write online guides, which you can read in order to perform research on a particular kind of item. For example, let’s say you like buying porcelain dolls. A quick EBay search reveals that there are 81 related “guides” to dolls. You can learn what constitutes a “collectible” doll or an “antique” doll. You can find out how to care for the dolls, and the difference between bisque and porcelain. There are tons of other guides, covering every topic from how to do your taxes to comparisons of plastic and wooden accordions.
EBay also offers user reviews of products like cameras, computer monitors, and video games. The review scores are averaged to give the total rating for the product; the reviews themselves can also be rated as helpful or not helpful.
All of these factors serve to help EBay retain its customer base. Users are apt to turn to the guides and user reviews first as their research source, so they’re more likely (since they’re already on the website) to bid on EBay listings than to go to other sources.