Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Elizabeth White, Dana Gardner, Jeremy Geelan, Helen Ching, Adrian Bridgwater

Related Topics: Web 2.0, Cloud Expo

Web 2.0: Article

eBay vs Amazon.com: eBay Price-Structure Overhaul Coming Today

Auction giant to incorporate Amazon-like fixed pricing from now on

Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay's global marketplaces business, has been telling BusinessWeek about a sea change in eBay's pricing structure. Calling it "the biggest, most fundamental change we have made," Norrington has told BW that eBay will today announce plans to reduce the upfront fees it charges to list sale items - source of up to 60% of its revenues till now - while increasing its final sales commission to make up for the reductions, which in some cases will be by as much as 75%.

The change, BusinessWeek notes, amounts to the "Amazon-ification" of eBay.

BW quotes Scot Wingo, CEO of e-commerce software company ChannelAdvisor, in its analysis of the news:

"EBay's move to court more fixed-price sellers is likely to be just as controversial as its prior changes. Auction sellers have argued that eBay is favoring fixed-price goods to their detriment, neglecting the business that made eBay the e-commerce giant it is today. EBay executives have countered, saying that eBay will always have auctions, though it has to give buyers the ability to shop the way they want. Increasingly, that means giving them the convenience of buying something for a set price — that is, ideally, priced-to-sell. "The vocal minority is going to be exceedingly vocal about this," Wingo says. "I think it is a great step…and for the fixed-price sellers it is a big step."


Reuters calls the eBay move "one of the company's boldest moves this year to boost merchandise for sale, lure new buyers and take on competitors," and notes:

"The novelty of online auctions has waned and rivals like Amazon have muscled in on its turf with strong fixed-price offerings."

eBay will announce the full details of its new fee structure later today, said Norrington.

More Stories By Web 2.0 News Desk

The Web 2.0 Journal News Desk keeps you up to speed with all that's happening in the world of the read/write Web and all its mushrooming new facets - from tagging, wikis, mash-ups, and image-sharing to "Advertising 2.0," podcasting, and The Writeable Web.

Comments (2) View Comments

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Most Recent Comments
jos 08/27/08 01:22:59 PM EDT

Looking forward to the pricing changes. The advantage for ebay has been an access to a global inventory, and the reduced pricing for listing should definitely help add to the inventory and the 3rd party providers like us (http://FindYourAuto.net) that build ajax-enabled mashups/search engines on top of ebay, that takes ebay search to the next level.

radixweb 08/21/08 05:18:45 AM EDT

Great Post...

Cloud Expo Breaking News
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for app...
"Having been in the IT field for many years, I believe the cloud computing chapter in the industry is an exciting one and I am proud to be a part of it," said National Reconaissance Office (NRO) Chief Information Officer Jill T. Singer Tuesday, as it was announced that she was one of 10 winners of the 2012 CloudNOW "Top Ten Women in Cloud" Awards.
As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where ...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
Can you bring services from the cloud to your customers faster and have them adopt it with ease of use or bring the power of bundled services to the fingertips of your clients without creating new rigid ‘apps stove pipes'? Do you want to prevent your business running away to public and unmanageably immature cloud services? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Hans van de Koppel, Sr. Enterprise Architect at Capgemini, will take Cloud Expo delegates to the developing world of clou...