posted on February 24, 2001 09:20:54 PM new
Here's some of what was said in an interview with US Piper Jaffrey Analyst regarding E-bay and Fairmarket the first partership promoting E-bays API. Analyst: Api has been a major initiative for E-bay for the last 9 months, and we all have been waiting to see what implications or what implementations we will first see and its been interesting to see this with Fairmarket because the full potential of API is to take the auction beyond E-bays platform to other areas other websites. And thats exactly what Fairmarket started to do.
Interviewer: Whats your take then for Fairmarket? I think this will give more ammunition for Fairmarket if there were websites that were doubting whether it would make sense for them to get into auction business themselves, now that they can see that Fairmarket would use E-bays platform and API it would probably mean more business for them.
Interviewer; Will API be the leading driver for E-bays expansion going forward?
Analyst: API is one of their areas. The reason its important is because for a long time Ebay has been viewed as an auction site where you go and find beanie babies and antique collectibles. For them to beyond that, they need to do a couple of things.
This gets interesting.
One is to be able to attract new items, not just used as well as brand names- and also just take this idea of a platform auction as a way that vendors can sell their goods. In other words make it as a merchandising platform. If they can do this they can attract many more merchandisers and sellers to their auction and commerce site.
But it's not the only thing. We are looking and certainly their international growth which had been very good so far.We look at the ratio of new items versus used and it has been growing so far. And we look at the new areas they get into, like autos and computers. So as of these are the econometrics that we follow to see whether Ebay can maintain its growh rate so far.
Interviewers comments:
With Fairrmarket Ebay gets the "B" part of "B-C" business to consumer which is significant experience at building infrastructure to support a big companys {retailers} sales channel with a dynamic pricing models with integration into the big retailers backend systems. Finally it will be interesting to see what merchants/retailers Fairmarket can bring to Ebay. Perhaps Amazon should watch out since the Fairmarket/Ebay solution doesn't require carrying huge inventory as Amazon's warehouse model does. Simply pull customers through Ebay and drop-ship from the retailer using Fairmarkets backend intergration to retailers systems. Business model of the future?
What concerns do you have over this and what can current sellers on Ebay do to operate a successful business on Ebay in the future?
