Though both companies were developed at the height of the dotcom boom in the mid 1990s, Amazon spent the following two decades elbowing its way to global e-commerce dominance as eBay sought ways to differentiate and reinvent.
We talked to Marni Levine, eBay's vice president of merchandising, at a recent event in New York City to learn more about the company's stance on Amazon, how it supports independent sellers, and its strategies for luring Gen Z. What do you think sets eBay apart from Amazon? We don't compete with our sellers. We truly are the small business champions. We don't have fulfillment centers all across the globe, we don't have private-label products.
Is Amazon terrific? Of course. They're terrific at what they do, but we're not going to compete there because we're not going to stand up hundreds of fulfillment centers and we're not going to own our own inventory. We've got to stick to what we're really good at and what we know.There's the perception of big, bad Amazon. If I have a product or I'm a maker, I don't want it to be knocked off by Amazon.
TikTok is definitely the next version that we're looking at. There's a little bit of debate internally around how do we leverage that and should we — [Gen Z doesn't] actually have income, but theyeventually, so how early on do we get them? But we're actually looking at all of the newest, latest, and greatest social channels to see where we can fit in.Levine: