Free eBay Technology Advancements Essay Sample
How is Technology Used by eBay to Improve its Services?
Through innovative thoughts, eBay has been able to enhance technology from hardware to software to web design to server capacity. Khosrowpour says that eBay used Sun Microsystems servers for the running of its flagship platform at ebay.com and the fixed price subsidiary. In addition, Khosrowpour further says that technology capacity was significantly important to the expansion of products, including both the domestic and international market share.
Schepp & Brad says that eBay uses a powerful traffic reporting tool which it uses to understand its own traffic. Customers normally receive real time data on the number of times their eBay auctions or areas within their store are viewed as well as the keywords buyers used to get to your listings. In order for eBay to be successful technology upgrade, advancement and implementation have been fundamental to alleviate any capacity limitations and periods the site would not be operational.
eBay uses PayPal which is a payment service and it allows buyers to transfer money from savings accounts or use their credit card without having to expose the account number to the seller. eBay also employs the use of Skype, allows more than 340 million registered internet users to make video and voice calls worldwide. The eBay platform supports the sale process which includes notifying users through e-mail after successful registration for the service, placing a successful bid, being outbid and listing item for sale and when and auction ended. This thus provides the buyers and sellers with a lot of transparency.
What Steps have eBay Taken to Improve its Quality of Online Services?
eBay uses web services where users request information based on any of a number of search, buy, sell, and management or comment criteria. According toMueller eBay supports a number of search techniques and not every technique functions well for every kind of search. In addition eBay web services returns the information you request in a standardized format. Through the use of web services users are able interpret their request, calculate the answer and also sent the result back.
In the year 2008, eBay introduced major initiatives to protect its bidders from fraudulent offers and malicious content. At eBay, locating a product is one area where its Web Services has a definite advantage over the manual interface. The online search engine only lets you search for items that you can purchase with PayPal with eBay Web Services you can search for another form of payments such as Cash on Delivery (COD) or American Express.
eBay resorts to more organized communication regarding the whole transaction, introducing another instrument of control over buyer and seller transactions. Cofta says that "buyers are protected by PayPal's and eBay's buyer protection program depending on the payment instrument with preferences for PayPal and is indemnified against dishonest sellers up to a certain amount". Also eBay does not provide the goods delivery service but more importantly its efforts are directed towards the control of the financial side of the transactions, protecting the position of the buyers.