eBay Porter’s Five Forces Analysis

eBay Porter’s Five Forces is an analytical model that explains five individual forces shaping an overall extent of competition in e-commerce industry. These forces are represented in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1 eBay Porter’s Five Forces

Threat of substitute products or services for each type of service offered by eBay is significant. eBay services can be divided into three categories: Marketplace, StubHub and Classified.

A great range of supermarket chains such as Wal-Mart, Tesco, Target, Sainsbury’s and others represent a significant substitution for eBay Marketplace. Moreover, the presence of e-commerce sites of all large supermarket chains further increases the significance of this threat.

eBay StubHub is a online place where customers can buy and sell tickets for  sports, concerts, theatre and other live entertainment events. Substitute services for StubHub include, but not limited to offline ticket offices, online forums and websites selling tickets along with other types of products and services.

For eBay Classifieds, substitute services relate to Yellow Pages and other similar print advertising mediums. Media advertising, as well as, advertising on a wide range of media platforms can also be mentioned as substitutes for eBay Classifieds.

Rivalry among existing firms in industries where eBay operates is highly intensive. This is primarily due to the impressive rate of industry growth and increasing numbers of competitors operating in the industry.

eBay competes with a wide range of retailers, distributors, liquidators, import and export companies, auctioneers, catalogue and mail order companies, classifieds, directories, search engines, commerce participants (consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer and business-to-business), shopping channels and networks.

eBay’s major competitors include Amazon Inc., Alphabet Inc, Alibaba, Yahoo Inc., Best Buy Co. Inc., Target Corporation, Chemours Co., Family Dollar Stores Inc., Staples Inc., Priceline Group Inc. and others.

As it is illustrated in Figure 2 below, the number of eBay active users has been consistently growing during the last six years. This is a clear indication of eBay’s share growing in respective markets in the global scale.

Figure 2 Number of eBay’s active users from 1st quarter 2010 to 2nd quarter 2016 (in millions)[1]

eBay Inc. Report contains a full version of eBay’s Five Forces Analysis. The report also illustrates the application of the major analytical strategic frameworks in business studies such as SWOT, PESTEL, Value Chain Analysis and McKinsey 7S Model on eBay. Moreover, the report contains analysis of eBay’s marketing strategy, discusses leadership and organizational structure and addresses the issues of corporate social responsibility.

[1] Statista (2016) Available at: http://www.statista.com/statistics/242235/number-of-ebays-total-active-users/