Obviously, anyone can learn a ton from studying this company. They’ve managed to excel in the online business in a way that very few other companies could. I think their acquisition of Skype has them positioned to make an even more feature rich environment for their users. Despite the fact that Skype cost a ton, E-Bay is starting to integrate them into their business model.

The Skype Me button solves several business problems at once. It helps spread the Skype service to the massive 200 million account userbase at E-Bay, and it helps legitimatize the entire auction process, by adding the “voice” at the other end of transactions. Auction comes full circle in this instance.

What can we learn from E-Bay?

1) Be innovative
2) Don’t be afraid to adapt your business model
3) Find more ways to sell your current customers more products

All these lessons seem obvious, but you don’t always see examples of them. It remains to be seen how well the Skype integration does for E-Bay, but it seems like they have a lot of good ideas that other online companies don’t seem to.

What do you think of E-Bay and Skype? Do you use either of them? How about Paypal?