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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 4 page paper. When eBay launched its business in 1995 in the U.S., it was an immediate success and it subsequently expanded internationally. It was successful until it launched in Japan where it was a dismal failure. This paper discusses the launch and the reasons the company failed. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
Page Count:
4 pages (~225 words per page)
File: MM12_PGebyjp9.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
(Lane, 2007). eBay had expanded to other countries relatively successfully so it launched its site in Japan in February 2000 with very little fanfare (Lane, 2007). eBay closed the Japanese
business just two years after it opened (Lane, 2007). With less than 3 percent of the entire Japanese Internet auction business, it was a resounding failure. What happened to this
company that had been so successful in the United States? It failed to do its own market research and it failed to consider the differences between American culture and Japanese
culture. As for market research, just six months prior to eBay launching its site in Japan, Yahoo! Japan Auctions was launched and had immediate success (Lane, 2007; BBC, 2002).
Yahoo! Japan Auctions did not charge users any fee at all whereas eBay charges up to a 5 percent commission on sales (Lane, 2007; Business Week, 2001). Worse, while many
Americans were willing to give their credit card information just to register to sell or purchase something on eBay, the Japanese people as a whole are very leery of giving
that kind of information (Lane, 2007; Business Week, 2001). The American culture is far more risk tolerant than is the Japanese culture, something eBay should have learned and honored before
trying to start a business there. Yahoo! Japan Auctions, by contrast required no such information to register. Furthermore, the Yahoo! site had 100 times more items on site than
did eBay (Lane, 2007). So, eBay did not do its homework about cultural differences. Even a brief cultural research effort would have revealed that the Japanese culture has low tolerance
for risk and high regard for privacy and formalities. eBay executives were rather presumptuous in thinking they could just enter the Japanese market without appropriate marketing efforts. The company had
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