When I checked the emails for my sister today, I learned to my surprise that she is an avid ebay user, with ebay toolbar installed and all. Then I learned that the recent ebay user conference drew 10K attendees. I never paid attention to ebay and its ilk, but these data points alerted me to the volume and the relevance of efficient auctions.

• there are 400M transactions on the ebay backend per day
• 69M users (11% of global internet users)
• annualized sales at $21B

if ebay and its competitors manage to capture a larger share of the $1.8T global market for their kind of products, there will be enormous efficiency gains that should easily be detectable in the GDP. of course, with efficient markets, there are no bargains anymore:

We passed a booth with a beautiful, extensive assortment of fountain pens for sale when my son, Adam, 15, decided to take a look. So we stopped, and the gentleman who owned the pens started showing us his stock.
This one’s a Parker from 1972, he explained, and this one’s a Waterman … Then he started talking prices.
You can have this one for $250 US, and look, it sells for more than $300 on eBay.
He pulled out a Web screenshot showing an eBay sale for that particular model pen. For me, the nature of the antiques market suddenly changed. No longer was it a local fair on the streets of Sao Paulo, where Paulistas could haggle over a painting, table or kitchen set. Now it was just another cog in the global antiques marketplace, facilitated by eBay and the Web.

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