I think as long as there are as many buyers as sellers Ebay will always be a success. I use ebay alot. I started out as a buyer but have become more of a seller, it was fun to search for neat stuff. I admit Ebay has alot of new cheap junk listed for sale every day but if you look deeper there are real items of value all over the site. By real I mean stuff that you might only be able to find by spending days or weeks snooping around in specialty shops. Example.. I was looking for an aeronautical item to decorate a cabin wall. It had to be something different that you couldn't get at the mall. Within 3 minutes I found just what I wanted. It was a set of tail rotor blades from a Huey helicopter. I had them in my hand about a week later. I also bought my Matrox Quad card and lots of other good finds on Ebay. Its just plain fun to search for stuff and its even more fun to sell things on Ebay. I have watched this fun spread to both young kids and old folks who have learned to use a computer just to use Ebay. One other thing that they have going for them is cost control. If business slows down for a while they just shut down a few dozen servers, no warehouses to close or sell. I think as long as it is fun, easy and safe to use Ebay they will always find and keep customers. The stock value is a whole different matter. I don't think I would want Ebay stock to be a "large" part of a long term portfolio but than again my long term portfolio is holding stocks for 1 week or less.
I have over 1,000 purchases on eBay. Tons of computer stuff (some for client sales) as well as a lot of personal things. About a year ago I got a great deal there on a big screen TV. In total I had about three dead beat purchases and over the term I think I missed two or three orders and got appropriately dinged for it. I also have over 100 sales of item through eBay. Only a few of those went buggy but I do understand that you can't expect total perfection. I have no problem with the service that I have received there. I have also done business under eLance as both a user and a provider. Some software projects, for me to develop, have provided many $$$ very effectively over the past year. Everything from web sites to Access/Oracle databases was on my plate at some time during the past year. Just today I won a server rack and four (new) servers for it for a client project that I am working on. The savings over the store/reseller route make it worth the investment. This is the second rack that I've done this way in the last three months. I've saved over $9,000 in my equipment acquisitions budget, this time, doing this. I am already over $26,000 under the project budget thanks to eBay. A savings of which I will pass about 50% on to the client. One who was already impressed with the last upgrade phase and the budget maintenance. eBay helps my company edge and I for one, love it!
This is turning out great; thanks to all who've posted so far... As for the ID thing, I have 3 ebay ID's myself, from forgetting my passwords constantly. But I totally forgot about the used car business...
I find Ebay to be very useful in procurring products for restoring my motorcycle. I found parts that would have a total cost of ~$800 from the dealer for under $100 in used parts in excellent condition. Most of which would be considered junk to most people who saw it. One item, unavailable from the dealer, is so rare in unaltered form, that if found would fetch in excess of $200, got mine from ebay for $30 from a person that felt it was garbage and gave ebay a shot. Keeps the stuff out of landfills too!!!!! I snowboard a bunch and have bought snowboards from ebay with great results, or sometimes use the prices from ebay to get a better deal from a local merchant and keep the dollars in the local community. The stock price is a bit crazy, but, they are one of the few if only pure internet companies making a consistent profit. The local consignment store with a national/international reach. Later, Cracked
But I totally forgot about the used car business... [/B][/QUOTE] I ran in to a guy on a trip home who had a really sharp Mercedes, maybe 74 that he said he bought on EBAY. Makes a lot of sense for people who are looking for something or have something like that rather than going to Carmax.
[/B][/QUOTE] I never understood how people could buy a used car over the internet. It just seems too risky.
Corso, I am with you, I have known a few people who have been burned with little stuff. I am also leery to mail strangers checks since there is always the risk of them helping themselves to a little extra. Not too hard with a good scanner and printer, but I digress. This was great looking car, Im not much of a car buff or anything. It was probably sitting in some widow's garage, so in that sense advertising on EBAY is the modern way of hitting the classifieds.
EBAY is a great example of a stock owned by people who like the company and could not care less about traditional approaches to stock valuation. YES, the company is doing great compared to all the dot-com failures. YES, the company has a killer business model in only handling the near zero-cost information side of auction transactions. And, YES, it has great first mover and dominant provider advantage. But, and it is a very big BUT, the company is not worth its stock price on the basis of current or future earnings, revenues, growth, etc. Yet, the price has not fallen...... The "problem" is that too many people buy and own stock because the company is good without going through the laborious process of a formal valuation. That's OK, but it does spell danger for traders who short the stock based on fundamental or technical factors that the actual buyers/owners of the stock are ignoring. The point is, ignore the fundamentals and ignore the traditional technical indicators because EBAY is not bought and owned for those reasons. Now if EBAY royally screws up and becomes untrustworthy than the stock will be dumped and revert to more normal P/E ratios. But until a large number of EBAY users have a bad experience, the price of the stock will remain anomalously high. Trade well, Traden4Alpha
Traden4alpha, That was a good post, the bottom line is EBAY will trade for whatever people are going to pay. The problem that I see in this market is that those bad experiences can happen overnight. For instance, GNSS and NVDA were crowd favorites in 01. And one morning people woke up 50% poorer. Not that there were not signs of the stocks breaking down before the drop. But sometimes when a position has been good you can overlook what is going on. Or at least I know I have in the past, and am sure I will in the future at least one more time. My bottom line these days is that it almost never pays to be a piggy.
I bought a car on EBAY and saved $4500 dollars. It has done a tremendous job at opening up the secondary markets and potentially making everyone a dealer of used merchandise. This is the genius of EBAY because prior to its establishment you couldn't hope in a million years to sell your copy of "Flyfishing With Charlie" to anyone. Now every average Joe has suddenly been given a mass audience of 50 million consumers from which to pawn their crap. However, from an FA position this industry is becoming mature very quickly. If my theory that I keep exposing: Bear market don't end until P/E ratios align with historic norms (i.e. 7-12) I would suspect that there will be quite a bit of PE compression in any company with a PE around 100. BTW: Lexus Nexus and/or WestLaw are probably more successful pure internet plays than AOL or EBAY ever were.