Don McMahan was looking through eBay about a year ago to help his son find a new bugle for his Boy Scouts troop.
Then McMahan, who is vice president of sales for Fujitsu's imaging products group, recalled some announcements about companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems selling on eBay. A few months later, Fujitsu opened its own stores on the auction site to sell refurbished equipment such as corporate scanning systems that can cost as much as $30,000 (£18,976).
The bugle hunt "was the first time I really spent time on eBay. Then I started looking around," he said. "What kind of did it for me was when Sun and HP both signed up. When they validated it, I said, 'you know, that could be a channel for us.'"
eBay may have a reputation as an online flea market that caters to memorabilia collectors and mom-and-pop businesses, but large corporations are increasingly using it to peddle used or refurbished assets that would previously have been sold to wholesalers. And while the trend has affected many industries, it has been particularly popular in the high-tech market, where it has attracted some of the biggest names in the business.
Technology itself has been a key factor in the proliferation of this online marketplace. Many companies are building internal pipelines that can send inventory data directly and automatically to eBay for listing -- essentially turning the auction site into an arm of their operations and purchasing departments.
Moreover, the early successes of its corporate customers represent an important victory of another kind for eBay, which endured wide criticism from small sellers when the company announced its intentions to court corporations a few years ago, in part to show how its expansion potential justified its relatively high stock price. Many individual sellers feared their needs would be superseded by those of large companies, and members of the auction site's impassioned community worried that eBay was losing its grassroots Internet culture.
"We maintain what we like to call a level playing field," said Michael Rudolph, general manager for computers and networking at eBay. "From a community standpoint, Dell, IBM, Sears -- all those guys (pay) the same fees that you or I do."
