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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.
I have very little experience with dating websites. My feeling toward dating websites is what most people's is: If it works, great. If you're serious and legitimate about it and know what you're looking for, then from what I hear, it's definitely effective.
The Internet rewards scale; by trading higher up-front costs for lower marginal cost, market leaders can invest in better technology and service. As a result, there is nothing online that is both great in quality and small in scale. Amazon wasn't originally a better bookstore than the small shops we mourn, but it is now.
I think there are a lot of honest people doing honest business on online auctions. But the control on these Web sites is pretty minimal.
The sort of the most efficient way for online dating marketplace to evolve and, in fact, any marketplace to evolve is to have one really big market where people can enter and exit as they please, where people have really advanced search, sort, and filtering technology.
What makes eBay successful - the real value and the real power at eBay - is the community. It's the buyers and sellers coming together and forming a marketplace.
You look at the tremendous success of Facebook. To my mind there is not a lot of commerce going on in these social networking sites. eBay is a community anchored in commerce. It is a commerce site that built a community around it. What has not been proven is if the reverse can happen and people will go to community sites to do commerce.
eBay's business is based on enabling someone to do business with another person, and to do that, they first have to develop some measure of trust, either in the other person or the system.
Bringing buyers and sellers together through a single platform is not a new idea - most of us know about eBay's success - but with advancing technology comes new innovative methods for businesses to connect customers with those who want to offer services.
EBay is a great company. There are a lot of good assets and good customers, and the U.S. people love it.