Visiting Ebay

Ebay is an online auction site in which people can buy and sell a wide variety of goods. Some items have to be bidded for and the bidder with the highest bid at the end of the auction, wins the bid and pays the price they last placed. However, some items have a "buy it now" feature, where the buyer can purchase the item for a set price. The transcation takes place through "paypal", which is a fast, safe way to pay money online. The site offers a wide range of goods and hence attracts a lot of custom and popularity. As well as attracting a wide variety of customers, it also attracts a range of ages of these customers, however only lets people over the age of 18 purchase or sell items. Their target market are continuing to grow as more people are using computers - older adults are more likely to use the internet and such sites as ebay etc. Popularity is also gained by ebay as many customers believe that they are getting goods at a very cheap price.
There are many benefits of using ebay over other auction sites. For example, a major advantage is that it is an absolutely hugely successful business and website and therefore has a good reputation. Furthermore, it is easier to track down products etc through ebay as they have been up and running successfully longer than many others. Also, support and help can be much more easily gained for the website because it is more well known than others. In addition, smaller businesses can find it easy to set up and run their businesses because of ebay as it allows them to have hosting for their products for a lot less than it would cost to set up an actual store or website of their own. Furthermore, they will recieve more attention from starting out on ebay as the site is trusted more than independant sites. A drawback of ebay is that there are costs to post images (which attract more customers etc) and other fees on top of this. This can end up being quite costly, however, if set at the right price the profit from selling the item should cover these fees. Also, buyers might not understand the product description or something similar and therefore would have to message the seller. However, this can take a number of days to recieve a reply and by this time, the product could have been sold or the customer could have lost interest.