General Motors and eBay will start a trial program Tuesday to let Californians buy cars online.
Dealers at 225 locations in California will participate in the program, which will run from Tuesday until September 8. It will be available at the co-branded Web site, gm.ebay.com.
The site will allow people to compare prices, arrange financing, and check a used car's eligibility for the Cash for Clunkers trade-in program. There is the "Buy It Now" option where people agree to pay the advertised price or can make an offer using eBay's auctioning system.
The trial will be started with 20,000 GM models from 2008, 2009, and 2010. After purchase, cars will be picked up at the dealership.
Gathering information online when buying a car has become commonplace in the United States. GM and eBay cited a J.D. Power & Associates study that found that more than 75 percent of people did research online while buying a new vehicle.
"As the dealer showroom expands from the parking lot to the laptop, this makes it easier for a customer to browse available new-car inventory, make an offer, buy it now, or send a message asking for more information from a dealer," Mark LaNeve, GM vice president of U.S. sales, said in a statement.
eBay said that its eBay Motors site for selling used cars has been getting 12 million individual visits per month.
One car dealer in California, Inder Dosanjh, told the Associated Press that he already sells used cars on eBay and plans to put his new vehicle inventory on the new site this week. "I think they should have done this a long time ago," he told the AP.
eBay on Wednesday plans to unveil a new e-commerce site for shoppers of environmentally friendly and fair-trade goods, .
In a bid to win over eco- and socially conscious shoppers, the online auctioneer will add a new retail component to its fairly new community site WorldofGood.com, which targets people who care about healthy living and the ethical treatment of workers. The site, which eBay built in partnership with fair-trade company World of Good, will sell products ranging from fair-trade coffee from Costa Rica to toxin-free skin cream from London.
The move is an attempt to capture a piece of the estimated $206 billion annual business in the U.S. surrounding fair-trade and environmentally made products. One of the pioneers in the business has been the natural food store Whole Foods, which over the years has broadened its scope to sell everything from organic-cotton baby clothing to fair-trade wine to eco-friendly bed slippers. Online, however, the business is still fragmented. eBay hopes to provide a one-stop shop for people interested in finding these goods.
"We have an opportunity to drive large-scale consumer demand by helping consumers make more informed choices about the products they buy, and doing so in a market that's historically been inefficient," said Robert Chatwani, eBay's general manager of the project.
What's different about WorldofGood compared with eBay, he said, is that shoppers will have more information about products--where they come from, how they're made, and how they affect the environment.
Chatwani helped conceive of the idea for the WorldofGood marketplace three years ago while traveling to India with fellow eBay employees. There, they found some sustainably made artisan products they believed would sell online, and could give some money back to the creator. They tested the idea and it worked. eBay teamed up with World of Good, a group designed to alleviate poverty in third worlds by helping sell local artists' goods globally.
Unlike eBay's traditional auction model, WorldofGood.com will sell products at fixed prices. The listings, of which there will be about 20,000 to start, will appear on WorldofGood as well as within eBay. The auction company will initially launch the store in the United States, but it plans to expand internationally, initially in Europe.
For now, the listings will span more than 70 countries and carry environmental or fair-trade certifications from about 25 eBay partners, including the Rainforest Alliance and Co-opt America. Product makers must have some sort of certification before they can apply to sell products on the site.
"Consumers are sleeping giants--they have a tremendous amount of purchasing power," Chatwani said. "We simply are introducing a new way for them to shop...and create a really positive social impact."
SAN MATEO, Calif.--Catering to a rising tide of socially-conscious shoppers, eBay this summer plans to help publicly launch WorldofGood.com, a marketplace for buying fair-trade products, according to Robert Chatwani, eBay's general manager of the project.
eBay, in partnership with a separate fair-trade company World of Good Inc., has already built a community site for people interested in goods that are made of recycled materials or produced by fairly treated workers, for example. But the two organizations plan to open a shopping site that will cater to these "social change consumers," Chatwani said here Tuesday at the Dow Jones Environment Conference.
That segment of shopper spends as much as $45 billion on green products annually, he estimated.
"Those people aren't on eBay. We believe only between 7 and 12 percent of these social change consumers are eBay users now ... so this could be accretive to the business," Chatwani said on a panel at the two-day conference.
Chatwani helped conceive of the idea for the WorldofGood.com marketplace three years ago while traveling to India with fellow eBay employees. There, they found some sustainably made artisan products they believed would sell online, and could give some money back to the creator. They tested the idea and it worked. Bay teamed up with World of Good, a group designed to alleviate poverty in third worlds by helping sell local artists' goods globally.
Chatwani said WorldofGood.com is only one project inside eBay that's focused on social change. Historically, eBay has been what he called a low-carbon company, built with more efficient online practices and an emphasis on technologies that are good for the world. But eBay also operates explicitly more charitable projects.
Those include MicroPlace, a micro-finance site for people to invest in entrepreneurs in the developing world. It also runs eBay Giving Works, a shopping site that lets buyers and sellers donate a percentage of sales to a charity. Chatwani said that that site has raised more than $120 million for charities.
For its part, WorldofGood.com will focus on giving people more information about products--where they come from, how they're made, and how they effect the environment, Chatwani said.
"Our challenge is not so much about getting people to spend more. It's about introducing alternative forms of consumption," he said.
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