With the development of high-tech technologies, the Internet plays an ever increasing role in the everyday life of users as well as the usual consumers. The World Wide Web offers an enormous variety of different products, services, entertainment and information. It's a "panacea for any trouble." Being a huge storage of information there are several searching systems that can be of great help when you don't know exactly the site address, or you are looking for a certain kind of information. But today we'll talk about the most famous and celebrity shopping network.
Frankly speaking, it's quite difficult to decide which shopping network can be considered as the best, the most popular, and the most famous. There are two of them - eBay and Amazon.com. The first celebrity shopping network - eBay - was founded in San Jose, on September 4, 1995, by Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll as Auctionweb, part of a larger personal site. It officially changed its name to eBay in September 1997. Originally, the site belonged to Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar's consulting firm. Nowadays eBay is The World's Online Marketplace® for the sale of goods and services by a great amount of individuals and small businesses.
Today, the eBay community includes 46.1 million registered users, and is the most popular and famous shopping network on the Internet. eBay's mission is to provide a global trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything. On an average day, there are millions of items listed on eBay. People come to the eBay marketplace to buy and sell items in thousands of categories, from collectibles like trading cards, antiques, dolls and housewares, to practical things like used cars, clothing, books & CDs, and electronics.
Buyers have the option to purchase items in an auction-style format, or items can be purchased at a fixed price through a feature called Buy-It-Now. If an item is purchased, the seller pays eBay an additional fee. Millions of items are offered, and in 2002, nearly $15 billion worth of merchandise was sold through this service.
People from all over the world buy and sell on eBay. The present day eBay has local sites that serve Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
There is one more celebrity shopping network - Amazon.com. It is an American electronic commerce company based in Seattle, Washington. It was one of the first major companies to sell goods over the Internet. Launched in 1995, Amazon.com began as an online book-selling company but has now branched off into many other areas, including DVDs, music CDs, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and more. Amazon assigns a unique identifier, the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN), to each item it sells. In January 2004, Amazon posted its first full-year net profit (for calendar year 2003). Its profits were $35.3 million on revenues of $5.65 billion. Much of the growth of the company was due to its international division. Amazon.com operates retail websites not only for the United States, but also for Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, France, China and Japan. Amazon.com also operates retail Web sites for Target, the NBA, and the Bombay Company. Digital shopping network doesn't go beyond these two representatives of celebrity shopping network. Amazon.com and eBay are the biggest and the most powerful shopping networks, but the World Wide Web can offer a great deal of smaller and less mighty ones (HSN.com, Shopping.com, ShopNBC.com, Shopathometv.com, etc).