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I want a company to be good for it to be good. That’s why I want to talk about eBay.
Some of you vaguely remember shopping on eBay during the Beanie Babies era, or don’t even think about eBay at all. Things sold on Amazon are worth about six times what eBay sells each year.
But eBay may have found a way. It’s still early to call it a success, but customers are buying more there and the company has made peace with not having an everything store. Instead, eBay tries to focus on what it does best. (The company will say on Wednesday how its business has progressed over the past three months.)
Former CEO of eBay enthusiastic To “make a bigger difference worldwide”. The new eBay is mostly trying to keep its loyal customers and merchants happy.
I know I’m doing eBay like a college grad who’d rather calm down than stress for success. But what if relatively modest ambitions are good enough? Her not always a good thing for people and companies to have the biggest dreams imaginable.
Let me go back to the dark period of eBay before 2019, when they were both surprisingly. successful and overwhelming.
For years, eBay was second only to Amazon among shopping sites in the United States, but it was even losing ground as Americans were buying far more online. EBay has been beaten by both Walmart and smaller online experts like Amazon and Etsy. The company has experienced drama, including noisy investors. Wanted eBay to change dramatically and a chief executive did not agree with his ideas and resigned Two years ago.
Since then, eBay has slowly and incompletely reshaped itself. It left some businesses and turned its attention to selling in areas reminiscent of eBay’s 1990s roots: used goods, items slightly past their peak like last year’s popular toys, and collectibles like sneakers, luxury watches, and trading cards.
No, creating a better digital forum for these items is not a heart-pounding innovation. But sales increased again. Colin SebastianeBay still needs time to prove its recent improvements aren’t just due to people shopping. everywhere Online during the pandemic. We’ll see if eBay achieves a solid and sustainable shopping site formula in the years to come.
Also, at a time when people’s shopping habits are changing more than they have in a long time, eBay may be missing out on a chance to be a little more reckless with our loyalty.
But I want to appreciate what some of eBay’s tedious fixes and humility about its mission have done so far. With Shopify, the largely unseen powerhouse behind many local business websites, may indicate that it is eBay third way in technology between extraterrestrial wealth Giants like Amazon and Google and the industry’s failure craters.
One of Big Tech’s lessons is that we would all be better off if we didn’t rely so much on a handful of great powers. When companies are very large, they can dictate access to information, habits around personal data, and business models in ways that make us a little uncomfortable. If we have more alternatives to keep the big guys on their toes—both cakes in the sky and humble ones like eBay—it’s healthy.
Before you go …
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Football stars asked Facebook for help: My colleagues Ryan Mac and Tariq Panja track internal negotiations on Facebook what to do About the racist online harassment of Black football players in England. After all, gamers are largely left on their own to try to filter out the hateful language directed at them online.
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Reclaiming control over the cloud: Brian X. Chen reminds us: the content we access on our smartphones is not really our own, to companies that save the material in computer systems instead. Brian explains the advantages and disadvantages of the cloud and the steps he is taking to regain independent ownership of his data.
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A meditation on grief and technology: A BuzzFeed News editor writes about How her deceased mother’s smartphone photos, text messages, and other digital artifacts are sometimes joyful and at other times bring with them unpleasant memories over which she has little control.
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This kitty is cute but probably ineffective flapper. (Note the salty tongue and thank you to my colleague Davey Alba. to tweet This.)
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