An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. Some exceptions to this definition exist and are described in the section about different types. The branch of economic theory dealing with auction types and participants' behavior in auctions is called auction theory.
eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. Sales occur either via online auctions or "buy it now" instant sales, and the company charges commissions to sellers upon sales. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in September 1995. It has 132 million yearly active buyers worldwide and handled $73 billion in transactions in 2023, 48% of which was in the United States. In 2023, the company had a take rate of 13.81%.
Name your own price (NYOP) is a pricing strategy under which buyers make a suggestion for a product’s price and the transaction occurs only if a seller accepts this quoted price. What happens is that the seller waits for a potential buyer's offer and can then either accept or reject that 'named price' that the user had offered. As the Internet is continuously being developed and online marketplaces are becoming increasingly more popular, consumers have more choices in terms of product pricing. Popularized by the reverse auction pioneer, Priceline.com, such pricing strategy asks consumers to 'name their own price' for various products and services like air tickets, hotels, rental cars, etc. The first bid a consumer places and the subsequent bid increments express the consumer's willingness or unwillingness to haggle. "The economic argument is that the number of bids a consumer submits to win a product in a NYOP auction is determined by the bidder’s intention to trade off higher expected savings from haggling against the associated frictional costs". NYOP retailers do not post a price for their products, and the final price of the transaction is only determined via a "reverse auction process", and these are key features that distinguish hotels and travel intermediaries from NYOP retailers. Similarly, LetYouKnow, Inc. pioneered the application of its own patented matching method within confines of the reverse auction process, whereby consumers name their own price for new vehicles.
An online auction is an auction held over the internet and accessed by internet connected devices. Similar to in-person auctions, online auctions come in a variety of types, with different bidding and selling rules.
Huuto.net is a Finnish online auctioning website. It was established in 1999 and has been owned by ePrice Oy since 2019.
Half.com was a fixed-price online marketplace for books, textbooks, music, movies, video games, and video game consoles. It was acquired by eBay in 2000 and shut down in 2017, with the domain redirected to the eBay website.
BidPay was an online auction payment service website, established in 1999 by Steve Chin and Marek Bradbury that allowed auction buyers to purchase money orders online using their credit card. BidPay was purchased by First Data Corporation/Western Union in 2001 for an undisclosed sum. BidPay was rebranded as "Western Union Auction Payments" in 2003 which led to confusion with Western Union's wire transfer services; the online auction payment service reverted to the BidPay name in 2004. BidPay ceased operations on 31 December 2005 and was purchased for US$1.8 million in March 2006 by CyberSource Corporation, which announced its intention to relaunch BidPay. BidPay had over 4 million registered users worldwide at that time.
Tradera.com is an online marketplace based in Stockholm, Sweden. With its 3,6 million members, 6 million weekly visits and more than 3 million listings at any given point (2024), it's the largest marketplace in the Nordics for sustainable shopping. Items are sold from both private consumers and businesses and are ranging from fashion and interior design to tech and collectibles. Although Tradera welcomes members from all over the world, most are from within the EU and Sweden. Tradera was originally based completely on auctions, but today visitors can purchase both new and second hand items through auctions as well as fixed price listings. Tradera was founded in 1999 but was acquired by eBay Inc. in 2006, which already owned the financial tech company PayPal. When eBay and PayPal were separated in 2015, Tradera became part of PayPal. Since PayPal's sale of Tradera in 2021, Tradera has once again become a Swedish company.
Gmarket is an 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, who subsequently sold it to Shinsegae at 3.4 trillion Korean Won.
Hi-Living is a Korean online auction website and shopping mall where people from all around the world buy and sell goods and services.
Etsy Inc. is an American e-commerce company with an emphasis on the selling of handmade or vintage items and craft supplies. These items fall under a wide range of categories, including jewelry, bags, clothing, home decor, religious items, furniture, toys, art, as well as craft supplies and tools. Items described as vintage must be at least 20 years old. The site follows in the tradition of open craft fairs, giving sellers personal storefronts where they list their goods for a fee of US$0.20 per item. Beginning in 2013, Etsy allowed sellers to sell mass-manufactured items.
A double auction is a process of buying and selling goods with multiple sellers and multiple buyers. Potential buyers submit their bids and potential sellers submit their ask prices to the market institution, and then the market institution chooses some price p that clears the market: all the sellers who asked less than p sell and all buyers who bid more than p buy at this price p. Buyers and sellers that bid or ask for exactly p are also included. A common example of a double auction is stock exchange.
Taobao is a Chinese online shopping platform. It is headquartered in Hangzhou and is owned by Alibaba. According to Alexa rank, it was the eighth most-visited website globally in 2021. Taobao.com was registered on April 21, 2003 by Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd.
iOffer was a San Francisco-based online trading community that was launched on May 1, 2002 by Steven Nerayoff. As of February 2008, it claimed to have nearly one million total users, including approximately 75,000 sellers, although this information cannot be independently verified, nor is it known how many of these users are active.
In economics and finance, the price discovery process is the process of determining the price of an asset in the marketplace through the interactions of buyers and sellers.
Customer to customer markets provide a 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).
vWorker was an employment website that enabled companies to outsource projects and independent contractors to find work. Together with Elance, Freelancer.com, Guru.com, and Upwork, it was one of the largest global freelance marketplaces of its kind. It organized and streamlined the management of outsourced employees.
A reverse auction is a type of auction in which the traditional roles of buyer and seller are reversed. Thus, there is one buyer and many potential sellers. In an ordinary auction also known as a forward auction, buyers compete to obtain goods or services by offering increasingly higher prices. In contrast, in a reverse auction, the sellers compete to obtain business from the buyer and prices will typically decrease as the sellers underbid each other.
Yardsellr was a San Francisco-based person-to-person online marketplace founded by former eBay executives in October 2009. It was shut down on February 4, 2013 to concentrate more on e-commerce at the short-lived social commerce site CompoundM.
Swappa functions as a peer-to-peer marketplace, facilitating the buying and selling of new and gently used technology products. The platform establishes a direct connection between buyers and sellers, emphasizing that all listed devices must be fully operational to be eligible for sale. Swappa has a dedicated customer service team responsible for reviewing listed devices to uphold this standard.
