Identification of whether the new product will be the modification of an existing one in your product mix, or the development of a new product.
eBay is an internet company that offers consumer-to-consumer services. Its product is a platform or online auction and shopping website where people buy and sell various types of goods and services from different parts of the world. eBay came into the market in 1995 and since then it has not remodeled into a new product but continues to improve in order to suit the needs of the customers and to match up with the levels of technology. eBay is very much a service and so it is not affected by the four product mix aspects (width, lengths, depth and consistency) in the same manner as they would affect tangible products (Conner, 24). The width of its products can be established by the categories (clothes, machinery, electronics, toys, and the variety of services jobs), the length cab established by the total number of products and services that its customers trade say in a day, depth refers to the color range, models and sizes of one given product line for instance clothes. Consistency refers to the relationship of various product lines that are available in the company’s website.
Types of modifications that can be performed
The kind of modification that can be performed on eBay is to improve the website, make it more appealing, user-friendly add more useful features. The addition of more features could be targeted to enhance communication between buyers and sellers in the course of trading. eBay can organize the website in such a manner as to make its features more visible and easier to locate in order to save the customers on time. eBay can also improve its consistency by ensuring continual maintenance of the site to avoid events where the company closes the site for upgrades thereby causing inconveniencing its customers.
How the product idea would move through the stages of new-product development
eBay new product development process would be an eight-step process. The stages are organized as follows:-
- Generation of the idea or new product after conducting an analysis on the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) on the company and the expected product.
- Screening of the idea for any ideas that should be dropped or adopted.
- Testing the concept on how it will suit the customers
- Involving business analytics on how the new product will help the company make more profits
- Using test groups.
- Developing the new product after the test group has given the desired results
- Releasing the product to the market, advertising it and monitoring how the customers receive it
It is at stage five (5) that it would be important to use one of the cities from table 11.1. I would recommend the eBay uses New York cities such as Albany and Rochester because these cities are highly multicultural, have people of very divergent needs, tastes and preferences which can give the company a clear picture of how the new product will be received in the market (Loch, 18).
How the management of this product will fit into your current organizational structure
The current organizational structure is based on centralization of functions. Internet companies such as eBay need to adopt hierarchical organizational structure in order to increase the security of the site and the business. If the new product is the development of a new website, the website faces threats from hackers and business rivals and it is therefore important for eBay to centralize its operations by adopting an organizational structure. At the moment eBay is headquartered in San Jose, California and it is where all operations of the company are run (Conner, 12). The new product should also be run under the central organization of the Company for security reasons.
Works Cited
Conner, Nancy. EBay. Sebastopol: O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2007. Print.
Loch, C.. Handbook of new product development management. Amsterdam: Butterworth- Heinemann, 2008. Print.
