In an excellent post about Meg Whitman's retirement, David Galbraith succinctly summarizes the most important thing about eBay's potential:
Ebay is all about Green, the biggest angle any company can have, currently, and yet it has ignored this. As the largest marketplace for second hand goods, it is the worlds largest recycler.
Similarly, despite my frustrations as an iPod Touch owner that Apple is charging $20 for an update to the device, I am heartened that their revenue model may be evolving, even if just in a tiny way, from planned obsolescence. They claim their devices are more green because of reduced PCBs in the circuit boards, but the best thing they could do is to make their revenue model rely on throwing away software, instead of throwing away hardware. It's been said there are hundreds of millions of cell phones that live in drawers, and I suspect that the 100 million iPods that have been sold were sold to perhaps 30 million households. That's a lot of costly devices sitting in disuse. Software subscriptions are a much less planet-clogging option than hardware subscriptions for companies which offer both.
That green argument needs way more scrutiny. Every time an eBay seller sells something, they ship it, usually via airplane, somewhere else. Airplanes are enormous polluters, and there are few promising technological innovations to resolve that on the horizon.
I'm not saying eBay's net effect isn't positive, but I'd want to see an expert crunch the numbers before espousing their greenness.
The vast majority of eBay goods are actually shipped via US Postal service or UPS ground, meaning they're using trucks, not planes. Most eBay sellers don't even provide air shipping as an option.
That said, there's a huge difference between "recycling" and "moving shit from one place to another".
> Every time an eBay seller sells something, they ship it, usually via airplane, somewhere else
But most new stuff is shipped too. Quite possibly further than on eBay.
> throwing away software, instead of throwing away software
Should the second “software†be “hardware�
Jeffrey: Maybe I'm misinformed. It's still a whole schwack of shipping, with (again, as I understand it) little respect for geography.
Darren: the shipping options are up to the buyer and seller. personally, i always try to find something i can buy and go pick up, rather than have shipped to me. i know many other people who do the same. that way i can inspect the goods in person before handing over my cash.
i don't know what proportion of ebay's transactions are private sellers, or what proportion are second-hand goods, but i'd bet most transactions in those categories are either shipped via post or picked up by the buyer and hence nearby.
Darren --
Are you saying a more green option is to throw the item into a landfill and having another one made from new resources?
I find it unlikely that cost of that with the shipping from overseas and trucking to your local store is a better green deal than hooking into the existing USPS mail network.
Paul, thanks for the catch -- I've edited the post to fix that.
Andy: Refer to my original comment:
"I’m not saying eBay’s net effect isn’t positive, but I’d want to see an expert crunch the numbers before espousing their greenness."
All I'm looking for is a little expert analysis to confirm all this green talk.
Here's an interesting (but unconfirmable) data point:
"In the U.S., more than 88 percent of eBay sales are shipped within the country. That means only about 12 percent of eBay.com sales are to buyers outside of the country."
I've been unable to find out how many items are sold on eBay each year, or what percent of that 88% is shipped by USPS. I'd be curious if anybody knew those figures.