In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ebay was the big cheese of online retail. Through dial-up modems, millions flocked to the site to auction off used VHS tapes and hunt for rare stamps.
Today, auctions account for roughly one in ten sales on the Ebay marketplace. Most are direct “buy-it-now” transactions such as you would find on Amazon. Yet Amazon, the new big cheese of ecommerce, hasn’t managed to knock Ebay out of the game.
Ebay’s main business is its online marketplace of the same name. It also owns Stubhub, an online ticket exchange for concerts, football matches and the like. The company makes its money by charging fees on sales on these platforms.
It competes with Amazon and increasingly with bricks-and-mortar retailers that