Since launching its business and industrial section in January, eBay has discovered small means big - as in, small business equals big bucks.
The online auction kings have seen a small jump in business-to-business sales, to the point where seven percent of the estimated $14.8 billion worth of merchandise passing through the auction portal came from B2B sales, according to Forbed.
And, while big businesses like Motorola and Silicon Graphics have used eBay as an inexpensive way to unload overstocked or obsolete inventory, Forbes said, the small and medium sized businesses are likeliest to be "the growth engine" for eBay Business.
"If they can turn those small-business sellers into buyers on the site," Salomon Smith Barney analyst Lanny Baker told the magazine, "that's a lot of purchasing power." And eBay may have given itself a considerable advantage in making it fly: they didn't set up their business side marketplace first and look for users later, Forbes said - they set up the marketplace only after spotting "a critical mass of business activity"last year," and then consolidated it into one site spot.
And, the magazine continued, eBay didn't just isolate it to small-business owners looking for cheap computers who stumbled over eBay - they spotted that critical mass and then began promoting its business market "systematically. It is running ads in trade magazines and visiting trade shows to get to know distributors."
