Review the website you selected for your Week 3 assignment. Create a 16- to 20-slide Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation with speaker's notes about your selected website in which you complete the f

eBay Marketing Strategy

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eBay Marketing Strategy

eBay Inc. is an e-commerce corporation founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar to facilitate business-to-consumer sales through its website. The headquarters of the American multinational business is based in San Jose, California and has an estimated annual revenue of $18 billion and more than 35,500 employees all over the world. eBay started as an auction site and has developed to become the engine for online shopping. The aim of this exposition is to describe the niche market for eBay, evaluate the website product and services, and describe how the website resonate with the assumed target market. Additionally, the paper will recommend a structural design to improve performance/customer satisfaction and propose key performance indicators.

Identifying a niche market for eBay is the fundamental concept for e-commerce from the onset as it is the basis for selling your brand. Naturally, eBay provides a platform for people to buy and sell unique products, and meet other online users with similar interest. The leadership of eBay has its attention focused on sharpening strategy focus and target customer segment. The company employs basic demographics such as age, gender, educational level, family income, and location to identify the target market (Ramos & Cota, 2009). eBay segmentation, targeting, and position serve as the marketing decision for identifying target market through which eBay aims to sell its product and service. The corporation has a single customer repository known as “customer DNA” which is enabled by Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse which collects customer data. The assumed target market for eBay is students, employees, and professionals. The company marketplace has eyes focused on the target segment to strengthen the base market both locally and internationally.

The company established customer relationship management (CRM) center with the central goal to provide personal and relevant outbound marketing. According to May (2000), segmentation entails the process of dividing demographics into groups based on identifiable characteristics to sell products. The company trades millions of dollars to eBay community based on mere trust and faith. The key words for eBay commerce include customer-to-customer (C2C), an online marketplace, online auction, and online mall. Most product and services are procured through shopping cart structure where customer identifies product or service and place an order. eBay service includes a marketplace, StubHub, and Classifieds. The company reaches out to consumers through online classified advertisement via Modile.de, eBay classified or Kijiji. Similarly, eBay also employs StubHub platform for people to purchase a ticket for online events such as games, concerts, and theater shows.

It is considered paramount to understand the demographic nature of the customer in order to connect via the website. The company web design and language used thereof connect smoothly with the target market. Since seller that make money through eBay website form part of target buyers, the website resonates with them by providing a platform to list items for sales. The website provides free services to buyers but seller pays a subscription fee for listing items on the website. Through the inclusion of UPC or ISBN the website connects with the assumed target market. The corporation exclusively entered into a strategic partnership with google, yahoo, and Facebook for the provision of graphical, and text-based advertising. By expanding its service to mobile commerce, millions of customers are able to transact business from the comfort of their houses. May (2000) reiterates that knowing the target market makes it easier to communicate by creating customer profile and segments.

Online business pundits argue that in this age of instant updates where customers have high service expectation, visitors to company website don’t have laxity of time and thus can’t wait long for the website to download. Taking cues from customer feedback or trends in online business and frequent updating of the eBay is critical for the brand position. Coding the website for quality and MobileFirst speed in order to reduce the dependencies thereby improving website performance. Optimize the structure design of website especially user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) for the mobile devices. Search engine optimization (SEO) and voice search will make the web page appeal naturally to consumers. Cache the eBay website to reduce bandwidth and thereby improve performance. The web page design should reduce the number of the HTTP request for easy accessibility.

Performance evaluation for website KPIs can be handled through tracking and analyzing data flow. Google analytics platform provides significance data that with the proper assessment of key performance indicators (KPIs) that measures website effectiveness. According to Ramos and Cota (2009), good KPIs and metrics should be quantifiable, measurable, and actionable that essentially help your company to succeed. Consistent use of KPIs that make an impactful change should have great bearing on revenue generation rather than attract traffic. The following are a key proposition for KPIs and metrics to evaluate the performance of recommended updates.

• • Pages viewed per session: the number of pages visited or viewed by users per session is an important metric of assessing how user find the web content appealing. If users find the pages attractive is an encouragement that the website updates are interesting.

  • Top Landing pages: With effective and optimized homepage an increased number of landing indicates that the update has improved web performance.

  • Goals and event completions: Goals completion indicate customer satisfaction with the website. By tracking event in google analytics and goal completion shows that website update is a true reflection of effective implementation.

In conclusion, eBay follows an exceedingly hands-off business model that provides a conducive environment for people to transact business. The consumer to consumer (C2C) and business to consumer (B2C) trading platform helps eBay to make earn income resulting from trade volume fees. The assumed target market for eBay mainly comprises students, employees, and professions in local and at the international market. Product and services are sold at the eBay website through keyword such as C2C. online mall, messages, and shopping cart structure. The eBay success can be attributed to its simplistic and pure strategic focus on target customer. The website resonates with target market through marketplaces, StubHub, and classifieds. Recommendation for improving customer satisfaction and web performance include search engine optimization, UI and UX optimization. Pages viewed per session, top landing pages, and goals and event completion are some of the quantifiable, measurable, and actionable KPIs and metrics for evaluating the performance of website updates.

eBay Inc. (2018). Why eBay? Retrieved from eBay: https://www.ebay.com/

May, P. (2000). The business of ecommerce: From corporate strategy to technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ramos, A., & Cota, S. (2009). Search engine marketing. New York: McGraw-Hill.