1. a) To elaborte one's interpretation of online community, one has to immerse themselves to understand that "civilisation depends on communications" (Sharpio, 1999). Online community is basically a group of people who seems to have common interests and they will basically interact, communicate, share and be expressive about these commons . Horrigan J. B (2001) asserts that these online groups "share passions, beliefs, hobbies and lifestyles." and In my early days of modelling the business aspect of online community. We called this "sense of belonging" which is where people will tend to profile themselves as "I belong" or "I do not belong" or "I think I belong" or "I think I do not belong". A community by definition is a "passive" or voluntary group of people and online community is therefore an extension of the voluntary group and social behaviour of the group experience in the "online world" - our World Wide Web. Before World Wide Web, there are already bulletin boards, gopher, newsgroups, CompuServe, AOL, and many other forms of similar online communities.
On this note, I really don't think Yahoo should be classified as an online community although one of the basket of eggs is indeed supporting "communities" or "groups" per se.
See
http://groups.yahoo.com/?ch=web&pub=fp-us&t=fp&sec=link&slk=defaultroughZope.org OTOH is more narrowly focused on the notion of "I belong"; the developers, programmers and circle of Zope followers and hence the website is supporting and promoting the social happenings within the "I belong to Zope" followers
1. b) Ebay.com Ebay.co.uk Ebay.com.au
i) To most people, this is basically an internet domain name. To me, it means regulations, internet policys, jurisdictin, cybersquatting, trademarks and intellectual property. From a marketing standpoint, there is really no need to regionalize or fragmentise ebay operations since the world is global and rules are easily defined and the boundaries of its core "auction" services is very few.
Did you know that it is possible to have ebay.world domain name ? Although not the intention for this exercise, but isn't the reason behind the various first level TLDs (top level domains) like .uk and .au a means to seggregate the currency and jurisdiction of operating business - corporate governance. Is there a ebay.to operation ? .to is a popular domain name too.Tonga's NIC has been selling their .to domain names to the world since 1996. Is there a need anyway ? The population of Tonga is only 119K people. ebay.to will give you error 403 but at Tonic.to, it says it is reserved. are they hoping to hold Ebay for ransom ?? Is there enough people in Tonga or outside of Tonga that may be interested in "auctioning" and "bidding" in the ebay.to website anyway. Online community in the sense of "I belong" in ebay case refers to the common interests in bidding and selling "articles".
Craigslist and
Kijiji are also examples of popular online communities of "buyers" and "sellers"; where people belong !!
Side note: a check on the domain names: there are many domain names available with ebay. If you dare, go ahead and get one like ebay.gg
ii) At ebay websites,
Paypal is the most common form of payment system for settling a transaction. Paypal act like an escrow account. I remember it started in 1995-6 as an novel payment methods - and the key business driver is "all you need is an email address and a credit card". Payapl makes becoming a merchant or customer easier. Other forms of payments includes localised version of COD, money order, western union and other local implemenation of payment systems.
iii) The perceived benefits are numerous but in summary; these benefits can be classified as follow:
- Sellers can turn junks into cash ! Sellers can make income !!
- Buyers can shop for cheaper deals, and otherwise hard to find items
- Ebay is an "online intermediary"; also a"transaction enabler" and its"content are supplied by many users" the same user supplied "content are also viewed by many users". The aggregation of data flow, process control and rule-based continuously engage its users. Its astonishingly addictive and useful !!
2.
Amazon.com is another model of a successful business - but it has also recently tried very hard to replicate the ebay "selling" model by creating a platform for users to engage in selling and buying activities. Another Web 2.0 incarnation, since amazon.com used to sell to customers books, it is now a repository of information, serving "users" with common interests as well as creating the social environment for people to belong. A purchase of the book is a simple few steps of clicking and getting an account and paying for it. Jeff Bezos pioneered this step and still hold the patent to this One-click process.
Yes, there are lots of "users engagement" and processes or input transactions which does not involve money (eg. discussion, reviews, forums).
Amazon.com sells almost all types of hard line products - more than just toys. When I was working for a toy company, they keep SKUs of our helicopters and flying robots. They also buy from my current company. They sell pretty much everything (except firearms and bombs of course).
The steps to making a purchase would entail getting an account, placing an item in the shopping basket and check out to make payment. There will be steps involved in supplying information including the purchaser's shipping details and credit card/payment information.
Food for thought: Does Amazon accept paypal payment ??
3. Price comparsion websites are now new - but the business model and key drivers for their substainability are definitely because of the fact that they have already engage the customers (in this case online customer who was seeking for the best deal being offered by the various online shops for a single product). The incremental effort of "locking" or "closing the deal" should therefore become easy - in theory. What if a customer uses these information and ask for a bargain from a local "brick and mortar" retailer to haggle the price down ? A typical retailer may budge since it is about turning over inventory; but hang on, there will be no sale for the price comparision shopping website then and no margin to be made. In that case, it is still playing a pivotal role in e-commerce - setting the price benchmark and levelling the playing field. The notion of "those who are keen to sell will sell at the lowest price" hold true.
Price.com is a typical price comparision shopping site. In Hong Kong, there is also a website called
Price.com.hk (no relation to the US website) which actually is more like a forum; but do offer information on the best deals in town for many articles. I last used this website to purchase my ASUS EeePC 901 netbook.
Reference:
1. Horrigan J. B. (2001), PEW Internet & American Life Project. October 31 , pp 8-11.,
Taking Sides - Clashing views on Controversial Issues - Science, Technology and Society by Thomas Edison. McGraw Hill.
2. Sharpio. A (1999)
The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We know. New York PublicAffairs 1999., The Information Revolution published by GreenHaven Press.
