Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Online auction
Summary
An online auction (also electronic auction, e-auction, virtual auction, or eAuction) is an auction held over the internet and accessed by internet connected devices. Similar to in-person auctions, online auctions come in a variety of types, with different bidding and selling rules.
eCommerce sales for businesses have been steadily increasing for years, and with the migration of virtually all transactions to digital due to the COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide sales through ecommerce channels such as websites and online marketplaces increased overall in 2020 and beyond.
There are two primary markets for online auctions: business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C). B2C is forecast to have over a 1% annual growth rate, achieving a nearly 22% share of total global retail sales by 2024. B2B ecommerce gross merchandise value showed a similarly steady rate through 2019, as to mirror its retail B2C counterpart.
The largest consumer-to-consumer online auction site is eBay, which researchers suggest is popular because it is a convenient, efficient, and effective method for buying and selling goods.
Despite the benefits of online auctions, the anonymity of the internet, the large market, and the ease of access makes online auction fraud easier than in traditional auctions. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) categorizes online auction fraud reports with online shopping categories.
Online auctions originated on web forums as early as 1979 on CompuServe and The Source, as well as through email and bulletin board systems. Auctioneers and sellers would post notices describing items for sale, minimum bids, and closing times. As the popularity of online auctions grew, websites dedicated to the practice began to appear in 1995 when two auction sites were founded. The first online auction site was Onsale.com, founded by Jerry Kaplan in May 1995. Onsale's business model had the company act as the seller.
In September of 1995, eBay was founded by French-Iranian computer scientist Pierre Omidyar using a different approach to online auctions by facilitating person-to-person transactions.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.