Word: set
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tailers, who can control the consumer's experience, eBay is almost completely dependent on how users interact. "We really have to encourage our customers to treat each other well," Omidyar says. "You can't tell people to do that. You have to encourage them to adopt a certain set of values...
...hasn't met many of her new friends in the flesh. But they're on her mind when she cruises clothing stores and comes upon a tantalizing markdown in designer duds. She buys by the armful, goes home to her computer and within a couple of days has set up her own fashion show--on eBay, in full view of anyone with a modem and a yen to bid on the clothes she puts up for auction. Bids race through cyberspace, winners are declared, and Wicker mails the goods to the lucky buyers--and cashes their money orders and cashier...
...Community" is an overworked term, too often applied artificially to any motley of people who share a skin color, an income level or a set of political bugaboos. But from the limitless ether of cyberspace, eBay has managed to conjure up the real thing. For many people, eBay does what communities have traditionally done. It not merely provides them financial sustenance but also draws them together with like-minded folk, offering encouragement, rewarding unique talents and interests, giving an outlet for their eccentricities and individuality and in some cases rescuing them from the margins where they would otherwise languish alone...
Plenty of reasons suggest that e-tail will crush retail. Take selection. There are the infinite miles of infinite shelf space that Amazon's Jeff Bezos loves to cackle about. And there's no need to set up those costly stores, with rent and utility bills due every month and a sales force to handle those pesky customers...
...companies with powerful off-line brands had a difficult time overcoming the notion that they would be cannibalizing their core business if they sold through the Web. But as it became clear that e-commerce was a viable and complementary retail channel--albeit one that requires a new skill set--the big off-line players gradually came around to embracing...