The eBay phenomena just celebrated it’s 20 year birthday. It’s only been 20 years of living with eBay. For better or for worse, eBay is part of our cultural fabric. As a society of “buyers”, eBay is a perfect match. Our whole cultural mindset is based on consumption…buying.

While it has as a primary function, 2 people, a seller and a buyer, the site in my opinion favors the buyer. It makes sense when you consider there are far more buyers than there are sellers. I also think that the eBay format generally causes prices (cost) to trend down for buyers. Not good for sellers…good for buyers. Overall, since there are more buyers, that is a good thing.

They reality of eBay is that every brick and mortar store needs to realize that no matter where they are located, right next door is one of the largest retailers in the world…eBay! Just about every retailer has to compete with them. Thus, eBay makes the world smaller.

Of course eBay has to compete with the other big on-lines retailers. Each find their niche with some cross over. The millennials as a group are comfortable with doing more and more of the “buying” on-line. eBay is part of that. All of this will continue to grow. And the world will continue to get smaller…