Blog link: https://blogs.ubc.ca/elizabethguan/2013/09/25/dotdotbuyandtaoba/

I totally agree with Elizabeth Guan’s idea that both of the price and quality of the product that selling on eBay is poor. Many of the individual sellers set extremely high price to their product. EBay is same as many of the online trading platform, which is business to consumers, sellers can sell the product to their consumers directly without other delivering fee and poundage.

And eBay is a very international trading platform, which means all the consumers can buy the product from other countries easily and everyone can use PayPal to pay the fees. That’s convent for both of the consumers and sellers. However the shipping fee is really high. And their reputation has been damaged.

So as a Chinese consumer, I prefer to buy the goods on other trading website rather than eBay. And actually there are many competitive trading website are much better than eBay. So I don’t think eBay will be really successful in the long run anymore if the operator try to find some way to cutting their shipping fees and control the quality and price of some seller’s product and services. EBay should change their strategies and they can try to expand more market to China. And build good reputation, build consumer loyalty to have long term growth is important for them.

Link to a blog: http://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alibaba-group-alipay-taobao-and-tmall/

China’s 11/11 online shop fest – the country’s equivalent of America’s Cyber Monday – has just finished. It’s been a record-smashing mega-sale on hundreds of e-stores. They have a grand total of $5.7 billion (RMB 35.02 billion) spent in the course of just 24 hours.

i agree with Josh Long’s idea. Many of the Chinese online consumers wait a few months for these big discount online shopping festival. And many of the online sellers sacrifice profits margins for extremely high sales revenue to attract more consumers. All these evidences show that the china’s e-commerce market is booming. And Alibaba also has over $35 million in sales on Tmall on 11/11 in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and all other areas outside of Mainland China. Which means they also have chance to expand the market to outside of china.

However, as for a consumer, although discount is beneficial because consumer can save lots of money and just need stay at home and shopping online, the quality of both of the services and goods are bad during these periods of time. And these have had a bad effect on the consumers that actually don’t shopping in Tmall. Because the speed and efficiency of express delivery services in whole china will be worse. So that will also demage the reputation of those online sellers.

Recently, Sony launches the new product of their video game consoles family: the PS vita 2000. All the fans of video game might be familiar with the Sony’s high quality video games consoles. And these days Sony has launch the new PS games console: the new PS vita 20000. Sony did a lot of advertisement of it and also setting a lower price of Vita 2000 than Vita 1000.

Unfortunately, after the released day of vita, many consumers have the reflection that the screen of vita is not good and they think the quality of vita 1000 is better. The sales of new vita are low and the price of it reduced a lot. That makes many consumers surprised.

I just find out that the reason of the fail of Sony this time: the games that can be played on this vita is much less than the games that can be played in PSP console. The machine is not the most important thing, the game is much more important. Although the new vita looks good and also have higher quality, more consumers will prefer the old PSP. But I believe after several years, many games will launch the vita versions the sales of vita will be recovered.