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Consumer to Consumer
C2C: Overview |
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Consumer to Consumer (C2C) websites primarily offer goods and services to assist consumers to interact. In the simplest terms, consumer to consumer online auctions connect buyers to sellers. The most familiar consumer to consumer sites take the form of online auctions. The most popular of these sites are: eBay Most of the consumer-to-consumer section of this portal will focus on eBay, as it is the largest and most well known auction. Yahoo! Auctions Other
well-known auctions include: The pioneers of online auctions are Onsale and eBay. Onsale opened in May of 1995, and eBay in September of that same year. EBay, originally called AuctionWeb, got its start when Pierre Omidyar founded it as a hobby. During a recent interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Omidyar said, “I sat down, frankly, over Labor Day weekend 1995, after having kind of thought about these issues for a couple of months, and I just whipped up some code. By Monday afternoon, Labor Day, I had the site up.” Onsale had initially sold its own products, and switched its business model to more of a consumer to consumer model after it saw the success of eBay. Most of the initial items that were auctioned on eBay were collectors' items, like Beanie Babies and comic books. Today, eBay offers a wide variety of items. In fact, they sell a motorcycle every 18 minutes and an SUV every 30. For some additional interesting eBay history, see A Brief History of eBay. This article from The Industry Standard timelines some of the more interesting sales that have taken place on eBay along with some other notable dates for the company.
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