Revenue Model of Google,Amazon.com and eBay

Google, Amazon.com and eBay are three well-known e-commerce incorporation around the world, but what makes them different is their revenue models, which is their ways to earn income. Google is a global technology leader that mainly earns revenue from advertising through its internet search, web-based e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, video sharing, and others channel. It has the largest, most comprehensive index of website and other content, and has made all this information freely available to anyone with internet connection. Although most of the services provided are free of charge to internet users, it still gains lot of profit from firms through Google AdWords, Google AdSense and Google Answer. Google AdWords is a pay per click advertising program that allow business to present advertisement to people when they are looking for information related to what the advertiser offer. Google Adsense helps to distribute relevant advertisement with search result and advertise on the Google Network members’ sites. Both of these are online advertising payment model which the advertiser has to pay for every time its advertisement receives a click.
Google Answer is an internet search which customer can ask question and researchers answer them, Google will keep 25% of the payment paid by customer, the rest will be sent to researchers.

On the other hand, Amazon.Com's main income is from retailing, which through selling wide range of products to three primary customer sets, including consumer customers, seller customers and developer customers. Besides that, it also generates revenue through co-branded credit card agreements and other marketing and promotional services, such as online advertising. Amazon.com’s revenue model relies heavily on third party providers such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, to maintain its sufficient supplies. The three operational strategies used are cost-leadership, customer differentiation and focus strategies.

EBay provides online market place for the buy and sale of goods and services to a diverse community of individuals and business. It provides services such as online payment services, informing seller and buyer when the auction is end, introducing category-specific bulletin boards and chat rooms for online communication offerings. EBay generates main revenue from collecting fees, especially from sellers. When seller listed their product on eBay, a non refundable insertion fee is charged based on their opening bid on the particular item. Once the auction is completed, a final value fee is charged on sellers, which is generally at a range from 1.25 percent to 5 percent of the final sale price.


All these three large global corporations are the leaders in different e-commerce trading, which are advertising, retailing and auction. They provide great customer services and keep on to be innovative in order to be more competitive. With the advance and expansion in internet usage around the world, all these three corporations will be able to keep on making huge profit in future.