An Auction? Most EBay Users Don't Have Time for That
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The online auction is fading fast. Fewer than 15 percent of all who post EBay listings are opting for an auction-only sale these days, according to a paper published this month (PDF) by Stanford University researchers who worked with the online marketplace for their study. Most sellers instead choose to offer items at fixed, “Buy It Now” prices, making EBay more like a conventional e-commerce website than the online-auction pioneer it was in the 1990s.
“This sort of cried out from the data we saw,” says Liran Einav, a Stanford economist and one of the study’s four authors. “Most people view it as a big auction site, but we realized their business is much more like Amazon.”