July 5, 2019

4 Of The Most Influential People In Ecommerce

 

The online marketplace is currently the most effective tool in boosting a person’s business, wealth and influence. The richest man in the world made his money through Ecommerce. The richest man in Asia has done the same. There are several other wealthy individuals who have gained the majority of their success through online selling. They have either been the first ones in the market or have come up with an edge so unique that they have been able to keep up with or even overtake the very best in their field.

All of these people have been top of the range entrepreneurs with a clear vision of what they wanted to achieve and how they were going to achieve it. They all have also dedicated an unprecedented amount of time and effort spent trying to get to the place they are aiming for. So who are these giants of Ecommerce and how did they get to where they are today?

Jack Ma

Jack Ma, whose real name is Ma Yun, is an entrepreneur from China and CEO of the Alibaba Group. This collective is made up of several of some of China’s most popular websites such as Taobao.com and the online wholesale platform Alibaba. He started his first business in 1994. The Haibo Translation Agency provided English translation to Chinese businesses.

On a trip to the USA in 1995, Ma had his first encounter with the Internet. On his return home, he founded China Pages,  one of China’s first online businesses. It worked to help other Chinese businesses to get online. In 1999 he founded the Alibaba Group, the basis for all of his future business activities. From here he launched a website that brokered deals between small businesses, which would grow into the Alibaba we know today.

Ma’s vision was that B2B  market (especially between small businesses) had much greater potential for success than the B2C Internet market had. Alibaba grew at a rapid rate, Yahoo!, which bought a 40 percent stake in 2005. In 2003 Ma created a new company, the consumer-to-consumer online marketplace Taobao.  With a well functioning B2B and a C2C selling platform created, Ma was able to create a tight grip on China’s online marketplace. As a result he is now the richest man on the continent of Asia, worth a staggering $44billion.

Pierre Omidyar

Omidyar is best known for founding of eBay, the world’s most popular online auction website. He has always been into creating software to solve problems. At age 14, he created software to catalog books for the school library.He worked for an Apple subsidiary company before founding eBay in the summer of 1995. It originally started out as a page called Auction Web on his own personal website, letting people list items for auction. However, the site attracted so many buyers and sellers that he created a separate site to concentrate on it,which was named eBay.

By 1998 the eBay had 2.1 million members and already generated $750 million.  It’s auction system became so successful that Amazon copied it and began running its own auctions in 1999. Now eBay is the second biggest global ecommerce platform behind Amazon and Pierre Omidyar is worth around $12.9 billion.

Craig Newmark

After graduating from university, Newmark joined the computer hardware company IBM and worked for the next 18 years. In 1993 he moved to San Francisco. In order to find his way around the city, he took many recommendations from colleagues and friends. This inspired him  start an email newsletter to help others new to San Francisco navigate their way around the city and its culture. The newsletter was commonly referred to as “Craig’s List”, hence the well known name of his business today.

Craigslist quickly went national and then international. Anyone can advertise/display items for sale, job offerings or even just generally informative content. The site has blown up into one of Americas most popular. It gets around 50 billion page views a month, earns around $690 million and made Newmark a billionaire.

Jeff Bezos

Bezos has a degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University. After graduation he worked on Wall Street, and in 1990 he became a vice president in an investment firm . After four years he quit to open an online bookstore that would make him the richest man in the world. Bezos set up the office for Amazon.com his  in his garage in 1994 where he started developing software such as the online book selling system. After inviting  friends to  test the system, Bezos opened Amazon.com, named after the  river, in 1995.From the get go, it was clear that Amazon was going to grow endlessly.

Within 30 days, Amazon.com sold books across the United States and over 30 other different countries. Amazon went public in 1997 and within two years later had outdone the majority of competitors, becoming an e-commerce leader. From here, Bezos continued to expand what Amazon’s sold, introducing CDs and videos in 1998, and later clothes and electronics.  Product after product was added to Amazon’s roster. New businesses entities, such as Amazon Local and Amazon Prime were also created to expand Bezos empire. Thanks to this unbelievable growth rate, Bezos is the richest man on the planet with $150billion.

July 30, 2019