Missing the eBay point

A new book about the auction Web site sheds little light on one of the Net's biggest successes.

By John Geirland

Nov 15, 2000 | I'm the son of swap meet habitués. As a child I spent weekend after weekend in pebbly, dilapidated drive-in theaters teaming with restless buyers in search of bric-a-brac and booty. Even though I hated the scene, I still couldn't resist the opportunity to squander a week's allowance on a bag of plastic vomit.

Now thanks to eBay, the hugely successful online auction site, I can bid on plastic vomit (or a remote control fart machine -- item No. 488929976) against folks all over the world. EBay is more than just another Silicon Valley dorm-room-to-boardroom success story. Few Internet companies have had such a dramatic impact on people's lives and livelihoods. All the more reason why David Bunnell's new book, "The eBay Phenomenon," is such a disappointment.

Bunnell is a legend in computer journalism -- the founder of PC Magazine, Macworld and New Media, and the CEO of Upside magazine. So readers might be predisposed to take what he has to say seriously. And to be fair, "The eBay Phenomenon," co-authored with business writer Richard Luecke, looks more like a primer aimed at the business crowd than a serious journalistic exercise. The book does a workmanlike job of describing how the eBay site functions and of recounting the company's humble beginnings in founder Pierre Omidyar's apartment in 1995. Bunnell also deftly explicates eBay's business model and its positioning within the "demand-based or dynamic pricing" segment of the e-commerce sector.

Once the reader gets past these surface details, however, the book's intellectual laziness begins to emerge. Bunnell attributes eBay's success in part to the company's willingness to trust the community that has grown up around its site -- its "hands-off approach to user transactions." He feels eBay executives have done a good job of keeping corporate trappings on the site to a minimum and staying focused on the user experience.

As might be expected, the book occasionally gets tripped up by Internet time. "[By] the spring of 2000," Bunnell writes, "it appeared that the frequency and severity of past service outages was unlikely to repeat itself." EBay auctioneers who experienced last month's service outages might take issue. The book does contain the occasional compelling observation: "Over the long haul, business-to-consumer (B2C) auctions seem destined to shoulder out person-to-person (P2P) auctions in terms of transaction numbers, participants, and gross sales. The reason is simple: for manufacturers, retailers, and airlines alike, auctions are an efficient way to liquidate unwanted inventory." Nothing revolutionary, but a useful insight.

Unfortunately, the book is studded with just as many obvious and empty observations: "In all likelihood, eBay will continue on its current course of making many small, little-noticed changes and improvements to its site." What major commercial Web site doesn't? At times the tone turns sanctimonious: "To their credit, eBay's newly minted millionaires were quick to give away portions of their sudden wealth." Often the writing style is tired and hackneyed, as in "[T]he site had all the appearances of a money-making machine."

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