Online auction company, eBay has signed up its ten millionth registered user in the UK, doubling its number of users in less than a year, and further confirming the success of online shopping in the UK.
ebay’s fifth birthday in October 2004, saw the site attract 7.6 million users, indicating that eBay generates 600,000 users every month. Commenting on the figures, Doug McCallum, managing director of eBay UK, said there were still “enormous opportunities” for growth. The “gigantic” second-hand markets for cars and for business, office and industrial equipment are worth “trillions”.
ebay appeals to businesses by allowing conventional banking arrangements and providing dedicated customer support. Computer companies, IBM and Sun Microsystems already use eBay to offload equipment they receive back from their customers. Vodafone also uses the site to sell mobile phones.
Mr McCallum said: “We are excited about crossing the 10 million user milestone. We now have a member in more than half of Britain’s households.”
Christmas 2004 saw online shopping hitting record figures, with online retailers experiencing a 23% increase in internet traffic from December 2003(see UK Online Shopping Hit Record Numbers Over Christmas 2004). A report from web monitoring firm Hitwise earmarked the week ending 4 December as enjoying the strongest performance in the sector, with online retail traffic increasing by over 13%. Ebay was amongst the top 20 UK online retail sites for the month, along with Amazon and Argos.
Internet advertising expenditure in the UK has also seen an increase, with the UK experiencing a 27% surge in online banner adspend(see Europe Sees Internet Banner Ad Surge). Data published by internet research group, Nielsen//NetRatings revealed that the number of banner adverts run on European websites has increased by 24%, up from 76,375 in November to 94,939 in November 2004.
The report also stated during November 2004 eBay ran 91 online campaigns in the UK, followed closely by Amazon with 84. ebay topped the list of the big advertising spenders, running 432 campaigns during November in Germany alone.
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