Roger F. Villere Jr. Republican Party of Louisiana. Steve Beshear. The Courier-Journal. Sheldon Adelson. Kathleen Sebelius. Scott Brown. Boston Herald. Lincoln Almond. Jeb Bush. Ann Marie Buerkle. Carly Fiorina. Eric Holder. Tony Perkins. Ted Cruz. The Huffington Post.
Jon Kyl. Marco Rubio. Norm Coleman. Minnesota Public Radio. Lucy Flores. Bernie Sanders. Sarah Palin. The New York Times. Eric Cantor. Brian Schweitzer. Martin O'Malley. CNN Politics. Nina Turner. Gabrielle Giffords. Peter Bragdon. Chris Christie.
New Hampshire Union Leader. Bob Vander Plaats. ABC News. Paul Singer. The initial public offering also thrust her into the limelight as the CEO of one the fastest-growing Internet companies in the world. Thanks to Whitman's advertising and marketing strategies, the eBay customer base increased from , members to more than seven million by Whitman continued to tinker with the eBay formula. That year she instituted additional measures to protect eBay customers from fraudulent buyers and sellers by offering free insurance through Lloyd's of London.
Whitman also pledged to help law-enforcement agencies to identify and prosecute individuals, whether buyers or sellers, who attempted to defraud customers or the company. In addition, for a small fee, eBay offered a stamp of approval for sellers from Equifax, one of the nation's largest credit bureaus. Whitman thus took steps to improve eBay's overall reliability. Periodically plagued by technical problems that caused the site to be down for extended periods of time, Whitman hired Sun Microsystems to maintain the network, while improving the company's own technical support staff.
Among Whitman's greatest challenges was fighting off the competition from other Internet auction sites. Seeing the success of eBay, several popular Internet providers and commerce sites, such as America Online, amazon. The move was critical because it forestalled AOL from starting its own auction site and allowed Whitman to continue building the company. However, in , Yahoo did begin offering free auctions in an attempt to lure customers away from eBay. Despite the challenge, Whitman held firm to maintaining eBay's fees for listing, which often discouraged sellers from offering less than desirable merchandise and thus provided a quality control that the Yahoo auctions could not match.
Soon, megacommerce site amazon. Still, there was something to be learned from Amazon and its abilities to handle large numbers of credit-card transactions. Whitman decided to buy Billpoint, an online system that allowed payments by e-mail, offering another enticement for prospective eBay buyers and sellers. To help eBay move into other markets, Whitman also negotiated the purchase of Kruse International, a collectible car house, and Alando de AG, the largest online-auction house in Europe.
The company had also virtually cornered the online-auction business, accounting for 90 percent of all on-line-auction sales. Even though its earnings fell short of projections, the company managed to accomplish what many other high-profile Internet companies such as amazon. Whitman credited much of eBay's success to its basic business model, which combined the elements of yard sales, newspaper classified ads, and auctions.
This approach appealed to a wide spectrum of customers, from those who list yard-sale finds to large companies such as movie studios that auction off memorabilia to dealers who specialize in items from books to electronics and office equipment to collectibles and antiques.
Whitman perfected the model: the company's role was simply to bring buyers and sellers together and to facilitate commerce.
The success of the site rests solely with its users. Though by auction-house standards the fees that eBay charges are low, often amounting to as little as 6 percent on each sale, almost all the monies generated are pure profit.
As Whitman has pointed out, the eBay model works perfectly for Internet commerce geared as it is to high volume and low overhead. Although the business model has proven to be a gold mine, many analysts are quick to point out that eBay would likely not have succeeded had it not been for Whitman's efforts and expertise.
By listening to customers and responding to their needs, Whitman could tailor the site to meet the expectations of both buyers and sellers while ensuring a healthy profit for the company. During Whitman's first two years at the company, for example, the site was often plagued by power outages, sometimes lasting a day because the high volume of traffic overwhelmed the technology.
Whitman's staff, and even Whitman herself, responded to customer queries and complaints by emailing or calling them directly and by refunding millions of dollars in fees. In creating the eBay brand name, Whitman built a fanatically loyal customer base, one that keeps growing by referrals from satisfied customers.
This fidelity is crucial to the company's continued success, a reality that Whitman took so seriously that she had an expensive customer-service system created to respond to customer emails within 24 hours.
Message boards and calendars listed on the site itself offer an opportunity for buyers and sellers to connect. The company also helped charitable organizations with auctions to raise funds for various causes. In creating this radically new approach to commerce, Whitman managed to expand eBay's base of operations without destroying the strong sense of community that the company fostered.
But in steering the company to its phenomenal success, Whitman occasionally stumbled. When she cut back opportunities for users to post complaints on the site, many customers were enraged. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, , Whitman organized a charity auction that critics called self-serving. The company also come under fire for allowing certain items, such as Nazi memorabilia, to be listed for sale, a policy that angered many in the Jewish community. However, Whitman pointed out that the primary purpose of eBay was to offer a forum where anyone could sell just about anything that was not prohibited by law, even though some listings might be offensive to certain individuals or groups.
Through the company's highs and lows, Whitman remained a steadying presence. Her colleagues found her hard working, dedicated, consistently upbeat, and relentlessly optimistic. She met problems head on and sought realistic solutions. At company headquarters in San Jose, she kept in close contact with employees, using a cubicle as an office and, on occasion, fielding phone calls and emails from customers.
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Julie Bort and Paige Leskin. In her decades-long career, Whitman has been credited with turning around eBay and making major changes at Hewlett-Packard. Now, she's leading a new streaming platform called Quibi. Here's what you need to know about Whitman, a Princeton University graduate whose among the richest self-made women in the US.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby. Her parents served in World War II. Her mom, Margaret, volunteered for the Red Cross, and became an airplane and truck mechanic while in New Guinea. When Whitman was a newborn, doctors discovered she was born with a birth defect called dysplasia.
It meant her left hip lacked a socket, and she was strapped into a stiff metal brace with leather straps until she was age 3. Afterwards, Whitman was able to walk and run normally. Whitman was an avid athlete as a child. She played tennis and lacrosse, and competed in figure skating and swimming. Whitman was also a great student: She says in her book was in the top 10 of her class, and she was able to graduate high school after just three years. Whitman initially wanted to be a doctor, and she went to Princeton University to study medicine.
However, she switched her major to economics after spending a summer selling ads for Princeton's magazine. Whitman's legacy remains strong at Princeton.
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