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September 29, 2004

eBay/Amazon: Depth, Breadth and Keeping All Your "Eggs" in Their Basket

Amazon and eBay developments over the past weeks got me thinking. Of course there is Amazon's attempt to grab more of the whole internet withA9. Meanwhile, with one of the most powerful walled gardens ever decides to keep Half.com alive despite the natural desire to push to one brand.

Across these efforts Amazon and eBay are duking it out for your all online buying dollars in terms of both breadth and depth. They clearly want you never to leave their buying/selling universe - or to put all your purchases of anything in their one big happy integrated shopping basket.

eBay leads on breadth by having so many sellers of everything that can't even be searched outside of the eBay garden, with Amazon working hard to match with auctions, affliliates, etc. Amazon still leads in depth, in particular in categories like books, music and DVDs, by shear completeness of its inventory list - if a book can be found it can be found on Amazon (or so you still believe). So how is eBay trying to match that?

I, like many other customers, go to Half.com first to see if I can get a book/dvd/cd for cheap. But often when I can't find something obscure I go back to Amazon. Why would eBay let me do this? Why shouldn't they make sure every time to have an answer to my search and offer to sell it no matter the price or the amount of time to deliver? Can't they cut a deal with big distributors and sellers like alibris to simply suck in their whole backlists too? I wonder why they let me put any eggs in someone else's basket.

(for more on the Half.com news see here, here, and here

Posted by johnza at September 29, 2004 05:06 AM

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Posted by: kirsten at October 1, 2004 02:09 PM

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