An auction is a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. The open ascending price auction is arguably the most common form of auction in use today. Participants bid openly against one another, with each subsequent bid required to be higher than the previous bid. An auctioneer may announce prices, bidders may call out their bids themselves, or bids may be submitted electronically with the highest current bid publicly displayed. In a Dutch auction, the auctioneer begins with a high asking price for some quantity of like items; the price is lowered until a participant is willing to accept the auctioneer's price for some quantity of the goods in the lot or until the seller's reserve price is met. While auctions are most associated in the public imagination with the sale of antiques, paintings, rare collectibles and expensive wines, auctions are also used for commodities, livestock, radio spectrum and used cars. In economic theory, an auction may refer to any mechanism or set of trading rules for exchange.
eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce corporation based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in the autumn of 1995, and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. eBay is a multibillion-dollar business with operations in about 30 countries, as of 2011. The company manages the eBay website, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a wide variety of goods and services worldwide. The website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items after a limited number of free listings, and again when those items are sold.
The Western Union Company is an American worldwide financial services and communications company. Its headquarters is in Denver, Colorado. Up until it discontinued the service in 2006, Western Union was globally the best-known American company in the business of exchanging telegrams.
PayPal Holdings Inc. is an American company operating a worldwide online payments system that supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like checks and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites, and many other commercial users, for which it charges a fee in exchange for benefits such as one-click transactions and password memory.
An online auction is an auction which is held over the internet. Online auctions come in many different formats, but most popularly they are ascending English auctions, descending Dutch auctions, first-price sealed-bid, Vickrey auctions, or sometimes even a combination of multiple auctions, taking elements of one and forging them with another. The scope and reach of these auctions have been propelled by the Internet to a level beyond what the initial purveyors had anticipated. This is mainly because online auctions break down and remove the physical limitations of traditional auctions such as geography, presence, time, space, and a small target audience. This influx in reachability has also made it easier to commit unlawful actions within an auction. In 2002, online auctions were projected to account for 30% of all online e-commerce due to the rapid expansion of the popularity of the form of electronic commerce. Online auctions include business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C), and consumer to consumer (C2C) auctions.
Purchasing is a business or organization attempting to acquire goods or services to accomplish its goals. Although there are several organizations that attempt to set standards in the purchasing process, processes can vary greatly between organizations. Typically the word purchasing is not used interchangeably with the word procurement, since procurement typically includes expediting, supplier quality, and transportation and logistics (T&L) in addition to purchasing.
Chargeback is a return of money to a payer.
eBid is an online auction website founded in December 1998. eBid operates in twenty-three countries where it allows sellers, United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Denmark, Hong Kong, India, Norway, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, Singapore, South Africa, Brazil, Malaysia and lists to buyers in over 100 Countries. Sellers and buyers can use any payment method by mutual agreement but PayPal is integrated.
Gmarket is a e-commerce website based in South Korea. The company was founded in 2000 as a subsidiary of Interpark and was acquired by eBay in 2009.
Hi-Living is a Korean online auction website and shopping mall where people from all around the world buy and sell goods and services.
StormPay of TN was an electronic money auction payment processor run by Stormpay Incorporated, a Clarksville, Tennessee, United States company founded in October 2002 by John R. McConnell, Jr. and the CEO, Steve Girsky. It allowed anyone with an e-mail address to buy or sell StormPay Auction items after opening an online account.
Google Checkout was an online payment processing service provided by Google aimed at simplifying the process of paying for online purchases. It was discontinued on November 20, 2013 and the service moved to Google Wallet.
bidorbuy or bidorbuy.co.za is an English-language e-commerce website based on an internet auction and online marketplace model allowing individuals and businesses to trade with each other. Transactions on bidorbuy are in South African rands.
Internet fraud prevention is the act of stopping various types of internet fraud. Due to the many different ways of committing fraud over the Internet, such as stolen credit cards, identity theft, phishing, and chargebacks, users of the Internet, including online merchants, financial institutions and consumers who make online purchases, must make sure to avoid or minimize the risk of falling prey to such scams.
eBay has experienced controversy, including cases of fraud, its policy requiring sellers to use PayPal, and concerns over forgeries and intellectual property violations in auction items.
eCRATER is an online marketplace and an e-commerce website builder based in Irvine, California. It was launched in the early fall of 2004 by Dimitar Slavov. By October 2008, it reached 1,500,000 items for sale in the marketplace and, as of January 2009, eCRATER has 65,242 active stores, and 95,773 stores have been created since its launch.
Consumer to consumer (C2C) markets provide an innovative way to allow customers to interact with each other. Traditional markets require business to customer relationships, in which a customer goes to the business in order to purchase a product or service. In customer to customer markets, the business facilitates an environment where customers can sell goods or services to each other. Other types of markets include business to business (B2B) and business to customer (B2C).
Alternative payments refers to payment methods that are used as an alternative to credit card payments. Most alternative payment methods address a domestic economy or have been specifically developed for electronic commerce and the payment systems are generally supported and operated by local banks. Each alternative payment method has its own unique application and settlement process, language and currency support, and is subject to domestic rules and regulations.
Pricefalls, LLC was an American Internet company that managed Pricefalls.com, an on-line retail marketplace, and PFTech, a leading marketplace platform developer. In 2019, Pricefalls, LLC was acquired by Loblaw, Canada's largest retailer.
Comparison of payment systems is a list displaying comparative information and fee rates on various payment systems. Information such as these are compared and shown: seller's/merchant's fees, buyer's fees, banking transfer fees, clearing-house fees, interchange fees, chargeback/return fees, currency conversion fees, monthly fees, usage, verification time, deposit time, technology support, customer-service quality, etc.
