The World 's Largest Online Trading Website

EBay has paved the wave in this industry and being in a billion dollar industry making things happen to benefit consumers in many ways.[5]

Amazon and Ebay are two well-known brands of online shopping sites. They have evolved and grown from small firms to the giants of e-commerce today. In this essay, a comparison would be made between the two firms.

Amazon.com Inc. was initiated by Jeff Bezos in 1994 after realizing the rapid rate at which the internet and websites were growing in popularity among business organizations and individuals. In 1995, the company started operating its website for selling books, videos, compact discs, computer software and computer hardware before being incorporated in1996 as an e-commerce company (Reuters, 2015). Apparently, the company offers may products and services for sale; these products include merchandise for resale products offered by third parties. In this regard the

Read the case carefully and answer the following questions: 1.Till 2005, eBay EachNet was the leader in the Chinese e-commerce market, controlling more than half of it. But eBay EachNet soon lost its market leadership position to Taobao.com (Taobao). In this context, analyze the reasons that can be attributed to Taobao’s edge over eBay. 2.a. To enable people to trade with each other, Pierre Omidyar created a marketplace in September 1995 which was later called eBay. By mid 1997, eBay received one million page hits per

The next segment of this look at the financial condition of Amazon.com involves a horizontal and vertical analysis of Amazon’s income statement and balance sheet. Since both of these statements involve many segments, we will address key and noteworthy figures to gain a broad understanding of Amazon’s progress in the last three years.

The three liquidity ratios show Amazon has very good liquidity, which means it could easily satisfy current liabilities with current assets. Comparing to Amazon, Ebay is even more liquid as it could satisfy its short term liabilities purely by cash and cash equivalents.

Headquartered in Settle, Washington DC, Amazon.com is a cloud computing electronic and commerce company (Amazon, 2016). The company is one of the largest internet based retailers both in the US and globally based on total sales and market capitalization. The company does a majority of its business through online retail websites throughout the United States and with more that ten countries throughout World. In 2015, Amazon overtook Wal-Mart to become the most valuable retailer by market capitalization.

The effectiveness of Amazon’s financial management can be seen in the performance over the last 5 years. Largely investor confidence has been very high throughout the 5 years analyzed. This can be seen in the increase of 4 times the stock price. Stock prices were at an all-time high the end of 2013 at price of $405USD each (Morningstar, 2014). Through analysis of the financial statements and history of stock prices it can be determined that the financial management team at Amazon is doing a great job.

It would be virtually impossible for a new company to reach the magnitude of inventory and status that Amazon maintains. When visiting Amazon, the number of products and services it offers is mind-blowing. Amazon has been in the internet marketplace for about thirteen years now; it would be extremely difficult for a start-up company in the industry to raise enough capital to even compete with Amazon on a lower level. The experience of enjoying low pressures from new entrants make Amazon believe that their absolute competitive advantages in patented technology, such as 1-Click ordering, operational model and “sell anything” mission could be directly copied and even leveraged in the foreign markets where the online retail industry have not developed or matured.

The company has many strengths. First, Amazon is the world’s leading online retailer. According to the 2016 Annual Report, Amazon had total net sales of US $135, 987 million in 2016. These total net sales include three segments which are North America, International, and AWS. Second, in comparison to many companies, Amazon has a superior logistics and distribution system, which allows the company to actualize improved customer fulfillment. Third, with its prolonged strategic drive on low-cost, differentiation, and focus, Amazon offers a wide range of product at low prices to customers. Fourth, Amazon enjoys global recognition from its customers. As stated earlier, Amazon built a strong brand in very little time. Finally, the

As for Alibaba.com, it earns secondary revenue through its Gold suppliers accreditation which promises reliability. Though Alibaba Group is famous for its primary site Alibaba.com, its first business now accounts for only a small part of its portfolio (Osawa, 2013), and is often dogged by criticisms from the finance world, notably referred to as “the worst asset that [Alibaba Group] has” (CNBC, 2012). On the other hand, Amazon sells its own products such as its Kindle and offers additional services such as streaming (Rayburn, 2011). It also deals with web design for external companies looking into e-commerce (Layton, n.d.).

Amazon has grown rapidly since their inception. The company experienced a surge is sales of 313% until 1998, supported by 8.4 million customer accounts in over 150 countries, of

The company eBay Inc. is an American multinational Internet consumer-to-consumer corporation. Founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar in San Jose, California, it is now a multi-billion dollar business with operations localized in over thirty countries including China and India. It’s main enterprise is eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website that allows people and businesses to buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services internationally. Millions of collectibles, décor, appliances, computers, furnishings, equipment, domain names, vehicles, services, intangibles and other miscellaneous items are listed, bought, or sold daily on eBay. Anything can be auctioned on the site as long as it is not illegal and does not violate the eBay’s Prohibited and Restricted Items policy.

Company D has higher current ratio and quick ratio which is higher 2.43x and 2.3x respectively. This was because Company D had higher cash and short term investment which was 55.6% while Company C only has 1.4%. It proves that Company D is financially conservative and it matches with the second described company.

In 1995 computer programmer Pierre Omidyar established eBay Inc. (eBay) from his living room in San Jose, California. He created a simple prototype of an auction site on his personal website and called it Auction Web, then let people list items for auction. He was amazed at the number of buyers and sellers that his site attracted and he soon had to set up a separate site devoted to auctions. By charging sellers for posting their auction items, and taking a small percentage of each sale, the company made money simply by supplying a place for buyers and sellers to meet. Business grew through word of mouth. A Feedback Forum was added to allow buyers and sellers a way to rate each other for honesty and reliability. Branching out from collectibles, the site quickly expanded into a vast range of items, including electronics, home furnishings and appliances, and cars and other vehicles.