For years, eBay and Amazon have been considered the go-to companies in the online commerce industry. The two were inseparable. Until now.
Recently, eBay and Amazon, the go-to internet retail giants, have presented their plans for the future and the growth they hope to accomplish in a retail ecosystem that is rapidly changing. The most interesting news is that eBay and Amazon, the two former peas in a pod, are now on completely different paths.
At the X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference in San Francisco last week, eBay introduced a new technology platform geared specifically for developers. The X.commerce platform allows developers to build applications and extensions for online merchants. For more information about the new platform and the X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference, check out this post from last week: X.commerce Innovate Conference: Day 1. The new X.commerce technology launches eBay into a new market as a back-end developer. X.commerce will take advantage of eBay recent acquisitions, like PayPal, Magento, RedLaser, and more, to build useful commerce services such as virtual shopping carts, inventory control, and tax management.
At the same time, eBay is also looking to build relationships with traditional brick and mortar retailers with the hopes of bringing the mobile payments ecosystem offline. Of course, eBay is still one of the largest players in the consumer retail market, but it appears that, going forward, eBay’s main focus will be in creating back-end technologies like X.commerce.
Meanwhile, Amazon has moved into a competitive role with digital content retailers, like Netflix, Apple, and Barnes & Noble. Recently, Amazon has been building up its digital book, music, and video libraries. Amazon has also announced partnerships with various television networks and music studios in order to gain rights to stream content to their Amazon Prime users. In addition, Amazon is attempting to court more authors for its blossoming publishing program that will publish more than 100 books this fall. The announcement of Amazon’s new e-reader devices, including the Kindle Fire, indicates Amazon’s foray into creating and offering top-of-the-line consumer gadgets to house its digital content.
We’ve evolved into a new era of commerce where eCommerce companies are making concerted efforts into moving outside of merely selling goods online. These days, it seems that every eCommerce company is having to become a technology company (perhaps in a generic sense in some cases) in order to legitimately compete.
We look forward to seeing what else eBay and Amazon have in store in the coming months and years…especially eBay and its recent acquisition, Magento.
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