Introduction to the Assignment

The e-commerce has been the most popular and effective way for buying and selling products and services over the internet. Such website showcase thousands of products along with details of the products with eye-catching price tags. The e-commerce websites not only used by the customers to buy products, many SME also sell and promote their products in the websites. Additionally, such websites also enables C2C and B2C e-commerce and ebay is one of the biggest player in this game where not only does the common public have a way to give-and-take surpluses, but businesses today can effectively improve online dissemination centers to extend their range and evade distributors.

EBay is a multinational e-commerce corporation established in 1995 by the Pierre Omidyar. It was first introduced as auction site. Later it evolves to a full-fledged e-commerce website and gain popularity worldwide.  Users can browse ebay.com to view products and buy their desired product or post some item to sell. Users can pay though online or cash on delivery by debit or credit cards. Like almost every e-commerce website it is also constructed utilizing distributed object technology (Haucap & Heimeshoff, 2014). This is used to provide high availability, high scalability and high performance. It is also required to store a huge volume of data in their database and also must be respond quickly when respond needed. Today, the eBay has more than 177 million registered user and they spend huge amount of the time as it has become a popular destination for shopping on the internet. The charts shows the count fo registered user against the years.

Other than managing the vast amount of users they also deals with more than 44 billion sql execution every day, 100,000+ lines of code are added every two weeks, 30,000 software builds per week, 30 Software Architects in its employ, handles 4.4 billion API calls per month, nearly 10,000 live applications and over 1 Billion photos. The above statics gives the idea about enormous scale of the ebay platform and the key attributes necessary to launch its high availability, manageability and most of all its scalability.

As shown in the above diagram, the overview of the platform is very simple but actually it is opposite of that as the architectural design is also based on the system architecture along with the software architecture. It is because in their platform not only web clients and web server is involved, transaction servers, proxy servers, application server, security server, and database. An architectural diagram is shown in the figure 3 which has 3-tier along with web-enabled browser, database, and transaction and application server layer. The relationship among the tiers are also established as well.

There are also several component model as transaction servers, proxy servers, application servers, security servers, databases, Web clients and web servers. Some of the key attributes are explained. Firstly, web browsers for modifiability where end users interact with the system and it supports wide variety of UI for different browser support and hardware as well. When users send request through their web browser, the request comes as https which provide high security as users personal information along with the transaction details can be stored on the requests (Kauffman & Chircu, 2013). HTTP is comprised with a sub protocol as secure socket layer which enables secure exchange of commercial information. When user send such request, it may reaches to the proxy servers first and data can be retrieved from the proxy as such information can be retrieved from the browser cache. However, when buying any item from eBay, real time respond is necessary. Next, the web server responds reaches to destination which are web server. Web servers has the ability to dispatch and handle requests while utilizing a poll of thread.

Overview of Ebay

Even though eBay is one of the big ecommerce corporation in the current market, they also faced some issue like controlling the shipping cost, credit card changes. MasterCard or visa r instance, if fuel charges increases I different regions that could impact the price factor for every product similarly if the transaction cost for online exchange is increased by the master card and visa that will also impact the price rate (Hui et al., 2016). Today, the eBay has more than 177  million registered user and they spend more a huge amount of the time as it has become a popular destination for shopping on the internet.

Ebay also have some weakness as well as they are unable to identify the frauds and vulnerability in their system. Their architecture is opened to third parties and several data breach cases also came to light.  The frauds are associated with counterfeit goods being marketed to unsuspecting users. In 2014, 145 million users of ebay was notified to change their password due certain cyber attack (Ye& Viswanathan, 2013). The attack was found by the ebay when they found that some of the registered credentials are comprised. They notified every customer to change their password. It is believed that the attackers wants to gain access to the corporate network of ebay.

There are several opportunities for the ebay to grow even more by adopting new business strategy. Ebay increases their focus on the service provider in last years unlike Amazon.

Finally, it can be concluded that eBay has become one of the popular e-commerce website. The e-commerce websites not only used by the customers to buy products, many SME also sell and promote their products in the websites. Additionally, such websites also enables C2C and B2C e-commerce and ebay is one of the biggest player in this game where not only does the common public have a way to give-and-take surpluses, but businesses today can effectively improve online dissemination centers to extend their range and evade distributors. There are several opportunities for the ebay to grow even more by adopting new business strategy as well.

References:

Haucap, J., & Heimeshoff, U. (2014). Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay: Is the Internet driving competition or market monopolization?. International Economics and Economic Policy, 11(1-2), 49-61.

Van Der Heide, B., Johnson, B. K., & Vang, M. H. (2013). The effects of product photographs and reputation systems on consumer behavior and product cost on eBay. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 570-576.

Kauffman, R. J., & Chircu, A. N. (2013). Digital intermediation in electronic commerce: The eBay model. In E-commerce and V-business (pp. 63-84). Routledge.

Neto, J. Q. F., Bloemhof, J., & Corbett, C. (2016). Market prices of remanufactured, used and new items: Evidence from eBay. International Journal of Production Economics, 171, 371-380.

Hui, X., Saeedi, M., Shen, Z., & Sundaresan, N. (2016). Reputation and regulations: evidence from eBay. Management Science, 62(12), 3604-3616.

Ye, S., Gao, G., & Viswanathan, S. (2013). Strategic behavior in online reputation systems: evidence from revoking on eBay.

Liu, Z., Cao, Z., & Wong, D. S. (2013, November). Blackbox traceable CP-ABE: how to catch people leaking their keys by selling decryption devices on ebay. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security (pp. 475-486). ACM.