eBay Now: eBay's Same-Day Delivery Service

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eBay Inc. was a consumer-to-consumer e-commerce organization based in San Jose, California, USA. It was initially founded as ‘AuctionWeb’ by French-born Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar in 1995, and was a notable success story of the dot-com bubble . The company officially changed its name to eBay in September 1997 and went public in 1998. The company operated a website known as ebay.com, an online auction and shopping website through which people and businesses bought and sold a variety of goods and services worldwide. ..

eBay was a meeting place, unlike a store, where people come to shop, sell, buy, and collect items of their choice through a fixed price storefront or through auction. It was a website which offered the convenience of buying and selling from the comfort of one’s home and was free to use for buyers and inexpensive for sellers. In short, it was a community of buyers and sellers with hundreds of millions of regular people and small and big businesses from all parts of the world, who exchanged millions of items everyday for prices ranging from a few cents to millions of dollars. In March 2013, eBay released a study that suggested that e-commerce experienced 60% less trade friction than traditional avenues of international trade and reduced the negative effect of trade costs ...

eBay had evolved into a vast marketplace with myriad products (over 45,000 categories). As of March 31, 2013, it had approximately 116 million active users worldwide. Analysts felt that the reason for its success was its role as a great equalizer. The cost to do business on eBay was the same for everyone – on a per-item or per-sale basis – and as a result, sellers competed solely on price. This level playing field allowed entrepreneurs to thrive on eBay. And the company exposed the seller to a large population and did marketing on behalf of the sellers through keyword search optimization and sponsored advertising...

On August 5, 2012, eBay invited some San Francisco users to test a new same-day shipping service called eBay Now. eBay Now’s beta version was an iOS mobile application that would let the user get same-day shipping on products from local stores for $5. eBay Now employed couriers to be on call, 24/7. Shoppers involved in the test could download the application onto Apple's iPhone and iPad, and then search for products to buy from local stores in San Francisco...

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