EBay as a Mall

You could say that eBay is a huge mall with over 22 million items for sale. The auction portion of eBay, however, is more like a big department store than a mall. The items are arranged in categories, and you can even use a search engine to find what you’re looking for. The emphasis is not on grouping the items according to seller. eBay groups items according to categories.

eBay Stores is different. You can search through categories and you can search for specific items, but you can also search according to vendors. eBay Stores is literally a huge mall with over 140,000 stores. It must be considered the largest mall on the Internet, and that in and of itself is a huge attractor. The eBay brand works to make this unique mall successful.

Nonetheless, eBay Stores are not nearly as successful as eBay itself— that is, eBay auctions. I believe eBay Stores will gradually emerge as a viable online mall, a powerful marketplace. Still, to get there, it will have evolved in a unique historical way. It will have clearly defied what seems to be a general rule on the Web—that general malls do not work.

Amazon.com

Amazon.com is itself a huge department store on the Web. It started with books but then expanded into other merchandise. And then of all things, it enabled other vendors to join it in what is analogous to a large online mall that co-exists with the Amazon department store itself. Amazon Marketplace (http://www.amazon.com/ exec/obidos/subst/misc/sell-your-stuff.html), as it is called, has been somewhat successful. But its success is not necessarily because it is a great online mall, but rather because Amazon is a great brand. In any event, it is not so successful as eBay or eBay Stores.

Brand names aside, if you really want to understand what makes eBay and eBay Stores work, look at the fees charged. They are so low that retail businesses on eBay can operate efficiently and offer substantially lower prices than bricks-and-mortar businesses or identical or similar businesses elsewhere online. In other words, it’s less expensive to do business on eBay and eBay Stores than in other major Web malls. And therein lies the secret of eBay ’s success and the success of all eBay ’s retail selling members.

Differences

Just for the sake of clarity let’s explore the differences between Web malls, portals, search engines, and competitive shopping directories. Sometimes the differences are not apparent because many websites tend to be hybrids.

Web Malls Web malls are simply aggregators of diverse retail vendors which offer very little or no content to attract website visitors other than the shopping.

Portals Portals are Web information centers for specific topics. As part of the massive content they provide to website visitors, they may also offer specialized shopping.

Search Engines When search engines are used as shopping devices, they merely search the Web for a specific product entered by a Web shopper. They usually return a list of vendors mixed in with other information sources relevant to the product. Specialized search engines such as Froogle and Yahoo Shopping eliminate all of the non-commercial resources and feature only the product for sale by different vendors. But the search engines are not aggregators of Web retailers as are Web malls.

Comparative-Shopping Directories Comparative-shopping directories in a sense are aggregators of Web retailers. Web retailers export a datafeed to become, in effect, members of a comparativeshopping directory. A directory provides a website visitor with a table (layout) that lists vendors compared according to price and reputation.

There are two things to note when you read the above four definitions. First, many sites are hybrids. For instance, if a portal robust with information starts to sell a lot of products, it starts to look like a Web mall. Likewise, if a Web mall starts loading on a lot of content to attract website visitors, it starts to look like a portal.

Second, you will note that for Web malls and portals there is a definite sense of place. In other words, there is a place on the Web where the mall or the portal can be found, and is always the same place (i.e., the same URL).

The search engines and the comparative-shopping directories are not the same. There is no sense of place. There isn’t even any sense of sameness. You can use a set of keywords today and get one list of links to products in a search-engine return. Tomorrow you can use the same keywords and get a slightly or perhaps even radically different list. Use slightly different keywords, and you may get a completely different list.

The comparative-shopping directories are like the search engines. When you search for one product, you might get a very short list of links from a comparative-shopping directory. When you search for a similar product, you may get a much longer list. The returns expand and contract, often unpredictibly. Such results do not instill in you the idea of a place on the Web. The returns from search engines and comparative-shopping directories seem to exist somewhere out in the cyber ether. (Of course, once you click a link and go to a specific vendor to buy something, presumably you will get a sense of place.)

Although eBay Stores seems clearly a Web mall and indeed one that’s likely to be ultimately quite successful, eBay auctions seem to be a hybrid between a Web mall and a search engine.