Arguably the two earliest starters in e-commerce to survive the tech bubble bursting, both Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY) positioned themselves well enough to thrive in Web 2.0. However, while Amazon today has become a behemoth ($1 trillion market cap and controlling an undisputed majority of online retail), eBay just kind of stagnated ($23.6 billion market cap, only about 10-15% of online retail despite being in second place to Amazon).
To be fair to eBay, nobody was going to match Amazon’s ambitions of expansion and world domination. That said, what was once a competitive rival for Amazon is now more of an afterthought than a challenger. I’m genuinely curious about how these two early starters grew so far apart.
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