eBay Moving Towards a Monopoly Position?

Without doubt, eBay is the world’s largest online auction company with around 135m registered users across the globe trading goods worth more than $40 billion a year across 100 countries.

eBay was founded 10 years ago in Silicon Valley as a local auction site specialising in collectable items. Since then, the company has grown to massive proportions both by organic growth and through selected acquisitions.

There are direct competitors to eBay in the online auction marketplace, but most are relatively tiny in comparison and some online buyers and sellers are becoming increasingly concerned that eBay’s dominance in the marketplace will eventually place them in a monopoly position.

But the commercial opportunities presented by a continually expanding global web are almost limitless - the pace of change is extremely rapid and barriers to entry for new players are low compared with traditional “bricks and mortar” businesses. So it seems quite possible that new companies will arise to challenge eBay’s supremacy in the internet auction sector.

One of the main threats to eBay could come from established mega sites such as Google and Amazon. While both of these companies have origins in different internet areas from eBay, they have recently moved into service segments that overlap with eBay. Amazon now has auctions and Google, already the leader in pay-per-click business advertising, is said to be moving towards classified ads for the general public.

So, with strong competition coming from established internet players as well as new start-ups, it seems unlikely that eBay will ever achieve a true monopoly position. Going shopping on ebay auction UK or any of the other eBay country sites would still appear to offer the widest selection of bargains for the immediate future.