Our research has pointed to the importance of trading platforms: The study of Cellbazaar in Bangladesh as well as the work on agriculture in the last research cycle.
It appears from this NYT report that the demand for trading (and payment) platforms is most vibrant in the mobile space.
John J. Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, attributed the company’s performance in part to an early bet that mobile phones would become a platform for commerce, with PayPal providing a lead in mobile payments.
“We’re the largest mobile commerce and payments provider in the world,” Mr. Donahoe said in an interview on Wednesday. “And we are continuing to innovate. We have a series of innovative apps that people are using. People love shopping on their smartphones and iPad, and PayPal is still the safest way to pay on a mobile phone.”
EBay’s mobile apps have been downloaded more than 100 million times worldwide. EBay sellers are now posting two million items a week from their smartphones and, last quarter, over 800,000 new users made their first eBay purchase from a smartphone.
Marketplaces, eBay’s biggest business, brought in $1.8 billion in revenue last quarter, up 9 percent from a year ago. PayPal — which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion 10 years ago — brought in $1.37 billion in revenue last quarter, a 23 percent jump from the same quarter a year ago, and it is expected to surpass Marketplaces in revenue.
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