Most things that people want already exist, and with Amazon or eBay, there is always someone who is willing to undercut your price.
Amazon is now the definitive source for data about whole sets of products - fungible consumer products. EBay is the authoritative source for the secondary market of those products. Google is the authority for information about facts, but they're relatively undifferentiated.
In the '90s, I went on eBay to buy some paddle tires for my four-wheeler ATV and couldn't find any. When I did find a manufacturer that sold them, I bought 20,000 and had no problem reselling them. So the next time you get mad when you can't find an item, realize there's a market waiting to be explored.
When I started half.com, our three biggest competitors were Borders, Tower Records and Blockbuster Video.
One of the really fascinating areas is marketplaces that take advantage of mobile devices. Ridesharing is the obvious example, but that's just the start of it, of selling goods and services with lightweight mobile apps.
Guess what? The world changes. eBay has defined e-commerce.
I do try to shop online and support people who hand-make their stuff, and because you can find stuff that nobody else has.
The thing that people seem to miss about not just Google, but also our competitors, Yahoo, eBay and so forth, is that there's an awful lot of communities that have never been served by traditional media.
If you look at the first commercial transactions on the Internet, few of the early companies necessarily survived intact, but the ideas they invented became the industry.
Is Amazon truly the best online buying experience? Absolutely not. Is eBay the best platform for auction? Probably not. Are dating sites like match.com really a reflection of the way people date? Probably not.
When we talk about the things at Airbnb that are challenging and that they are going to have to overcome, the parallels with eBay are across the board. It's community management. It's making sure the marketplace is in balance - the right amount of buyers and sellers.
Although eBay is a fantastic tool for collectors who want to buy or sell, you really have to have knowledge of items before you embark.
I've been lucky enough to be involved in a number of great startups, including eBay and Wikia as an entrepreneur and LinkedIn and Paypal as an investor.
L.A. has a lot of good flea markets - the Rose Bowl is always a good one. I have taken to eBay, too. Some of my favorite things - especially chairs, for some reason - I got on eBay.
I would think that most of the online business will be conducted by traditional retailers and that over 90 per cent of the e-retailers will, in fact, all go out of business.
Google helps us sort the Internet by providing a sense of hierarchy to information. Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to filter the news we encounter. Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market.
New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster.com, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free?
The biggest ones [online stores] I go back to are Amazon.com and eBay.com because it’s great for music and books... I collect vintage vinyl records.
Designers were saying to me that they didn't have a place to sell their special pieces from the runway.
I shopped a lot on 1stdibs.com when I first started modelling. Just whenever, I've always been on and bought all my furniture on 1stdibs.com.
It's easy to forget the ever-plodding eBay with all the noise made by the more lithe and lively Web 2.0 companies.
On Etsy, you can't resell new goods you weren't involved in making, whereas on eBay and Amazon, that is more than welcome - everything from dishwashers to XBoxes, curling irons, espresso machines, and metal detectors.
