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Amazon vs. eBay: 2 Charts Say It All

Measuring user growth, which I am guessing is based on U.S. figures (?), for large sites such as eBay and Amazon is mostly meaningless considering the number of internet users who need a service as such and who shop online. A more meaningful user metric would be active users and we all know how hard that figure is to compute. So let us stick with the dollar figures.

Vansak nailed it on the head with his (her?) comment.

I'd rather skim 18.66% off of 100s of millions units sold for the next several years than to skim 3.23% off of millions (or even 10s of millions) of units sold for those same years or even for more years thereafter.

Yeah, eBay needs to improve and it looks like they are getting there. I think they have slighted the sellers a bit but I also think many of those sellers were not true business people prepared for the eventual maturation of a new market channel (such as online auction) or should I say their (the sellers) ONLY market channel. I am sure many feeling burned were "eBay only" businesses that did not expand their horizons.

Some Laws (Like Supply and Demand) Can't Be Broken

The San Francisco Chronicle had an article on Sunday about the lack of prosecutions and an assertion that this credit crisis is not real. The writer said that it's a deep recession from too much debt and too much debt-financed consumption but that the idea that it's because consumers and businesses can't borrow more is a lie devised by the banks to justify handing them a lot of money that they aren't going to lend to consumers and businesses anyway.

Check it out: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin...

Why 'GooBay' Makes Sense

I'd like to agree and I will. Not being the typical eBay story commentor (a disgruntled eBay/PayPal user with too much time on their hands and probably with very little, if any, shares of eBay stock owned), I may be able to shed a different perspective from the folks above.

Sure, eBay is a maturing company just as Google is starting to do. However, eBay is still a cash cow. Each of eBay's additional (hot) properties (PayPal, Skype, StubHub, and slowly but surely Kijiji) are worth a decent chunk of change on their own and are leaders in their fields. Not to mention that eBay is extremely cheap at this point in time.

Skype would fill Google's need for communication that they have been toying around with in different forms. PayPal would give them the payment facilities they have also been desperately seeking. Kijiji and the 25% stake in Craigslist would given them a rounded out ecommerce complement to what eBay and StubHub bring. All this while accumulating all the data behind these sites, like Google likes to do and claim ("manage the world's data"). Google will then twist it in different ways to squeeze out new products, services, and advertising revenue.

The savings eBay would enjoy, if owned by Google, in terms of advertising in search results would help save on eBay's costs as well as allow more search result penetration like back in the days when pretty much any search term on Google resulted in an eBay result (even if it made no sense "Find 'wine stains' on eBay").

I just don't know how Google could manage such a gigantic endeavor.

At its current price, this makes mostly sense. If eBay ever gets back up in the 20s, I don't think it would make as much sense.

eBay or Amazon would definately benefit from better integration with search engine results since both of their internal search mechanisms are lacking even though they have improved as of late.

eBay: A Countercyclical Opportunity

Why did you let ebay post their propaganda piece (that is full of lies) here???