1. What is eBay’s problem?
2. Which marketing strategy was eBay following: market development or product development? Do you agree with it?
3. What decision-making process should CEO Donahoe utilize to make the decisions necessary to change the company’s product, customer approach, and business model?

Pierre Omidyar founded a sole proprietorship in September 1995 called Auction Web to allow people to buy and sell goods over the Internet. The new venture was based on the idea of developing a community-driven process, where an organic, evolving, self-organizing web of individual relationships, formed around shared interests, would handle tasks that other companies handle with customer service operations. By May 1996, Omidyar had added Jeff Skoll as a partner and the venture was incorporated as eBay. Two years later, Omidyar asked Meg Whitman to direct corporate strategy to continue the accelerated growth rate of the company. Whitman brought to the company global management and marketing experience and soon became President and CEO. In almost no time, the company became one of the Web’s most successful sites, with 233 million registered users. By 2007, the average eBay user spent nearly two hours a month on the site—more than five times the time spent on Amazon.com