had closed in the past 12 hours; others were still open. A wood bookshelf hadn't sold. But a Siberian lamb coat, a shaggy white garment she had snagged for $20 and that had languished on eBay for days with no bids, had become a hot ticket the night before. In the hour before the auction was to close, 10 bidders sent the price up to $86. "It's getting darker earlier," Satchouk reasons, "so more people are getting online."
With the confidence of someone who knows her business, Satchouk says people typically wait until the last minute to bid. That's why she is surprised to see a 1917 Nippon 12-piece chocolate set that she listed for $29 going for $57 with four days left in the auction.
The day's overall gains are modest but encouraging. Of 33 items up for sale with a combined starting price of $425, current bids are now at $507. "That's not bad considering most of this stuff hasn't been bid up," she says.
For Satchouk, selling on eBay has become more than a job. She talks about the fun of doing what she likes and the satisfaction of being her own boss. "I used to buy stuff and hope that some day I would have a beautiful house to put it in. Now, at least I can own it for a while."
She also decries, in plain terms, what she sees as inefficiencies in the retail economy. "I think retailers have taken advantage of people for too long." Store prices are too high, she argues, because they cater to a semicaptive audience. On eBay - which has an abundant supply of buyers and sellers - the selling price for a given item is what the market is willing to pay, she adds, or closer to the fair value of the item.
There is no question that eBay has become one of the most subversive creations of the Internet Economy. Its success in bringing together buyers and sellers has created a revolutionary and active marketplace, and may forever change the world of commerce.
The dollars being traded on eBay by these new businesses and individuals are significant: Sellers took in a combined $741 million in the most recent quarter, almost four times more than a year earlier. That means for every dollar spent on Amazon.com (AMZN), the world's largest Internet retailer, more than $2 is spent on eBay. (However, eBay takes only a small percentage of items sold, so its revenues are much smaller than Amazon's.) At the current rate, eBay sellers generate roughly as many dollars in sales as all of the Barnes & Noble (dossier) brick-and-mortar bookstores combined.
Steve Westly, eBay's VP of marketing and business development, says more than 20,000 people conduct "some or all of their livelihood on eBay." EBay won't say exactly how many of the millions of items for sale on its Web site are posted by those merchants. But even as the company continues to call itself a "consumer-to-consumer" marketplace, it's increasingly become a business-to-consumer exchange.
According to Andale, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based software maker that provides Web-based services for eBay "power sellers," 4 percent of people sell 80 percent of the items on eBay. Others - such as Scott Randall, president and CEO of FairMarket, which runs a network of more than 100 smaller auction sites - more conservatively suggest that 80 percent of items at online auctions are sold by 20 percent of sellers.
Regardless of the exact numbers, it is clear that although eBay's 7.7 million users are the hallmark of its success, a much smaller number of power sellers grease the wheels of that online marketplace.
Not surprisingly, since eBay turned its early investors into billionaires, a slew of imitators has sought to challenge the company. Roughly 1,000 online auction sites have sprung up in the last couple of years. Some are general merchandise exchanges, while others concentrate on specialty items.
Yahoo (YHOO) and
