Business

The profitability of an organization is dependent largely on how well it is able to respond to the emerging needs. The capacity to effectively balance between scarce resources and increased wants goes a long way in ensuring optimal organizational operation and successful performance. eBay is a company that is engaged in online marketing and sale of goods and services.
Background and Problem Statement
The company has been faced with several challenges in its operations, just like it has had successful times. Among the greatest challenges was the competition that was presented by other online advertising companies like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. As globalization has been taking shape and the use of the internet has been expanding, eBay has sought to improve its performance through outsourcing of its services to overseas nations. This off-shoring was an attempt to make use of the available resources elsewhere getting other people to do the customer support services more cheaply than it cost to do the same at home. Offshoring, when used very well and applied carefully, can bring about benefits that can in turn catapult an organization to great heights of achievement (CIBER Case Collection, 2009).
As the most common form of outsourcing in this era of globalization, this strategy was employed by eBay to enhance its competitive edge in the market, having been faced with stiff competition from another online marketing agency, Amazon.com. One of the main problem that competition presents is that both buyers and sellers are keen to advertise with companies that are capable of affording them real value for their money by linking buyers to sellers and sellers to buyers. To achieve this, eBay had to remain the company that best did this. To do this effectively, however, it had to have an increased access to both buyers and sellers. This could be achieved faster through outsourcing. This is where the problem arose The employees did not feel particularly pleased to have work they could do given over to others. Then the issue of quality was critical, as fears of poor service, especially in India, were real. eBay was then faced with the toughest choice ever How much more to outsource, and how to maintain quality (CIBER Case Collection, 2009).
As long as outsourcing was not off-shored, no major quality concerns arose. When outsourcing was expanded to include countries like the Philippines, problems emerged and the decision to expand outsourcing was in need of reconsideration. Email and text services were much easier to outsource, but there still had to be customer support staff off-shored to deal with correspondences over the phone as this was the most popular means of communication then. Keeping such staff in-house would prove very costly to eBay. The issue that emerged, then, was how to keep standards up to date but minimize costs and enhance business growth through increased client base (CIBER Case Collection, 2009).
Conclusion
eBay is an expanding service company specializing in online marketing. However, having discovered the value of outsourcing after initial trials in India, the company is grappling with prospects of expanding its outsourcing program. Issues of employee dissatisfaction and the likely compromise on quality of service are hard to overlook. On the one side, compromising quality will send away customers, and employees ought to be party to any decision touching on their welfare. The best way forward in such a matter would involve the use of offshoring of the less essential handling of text and email correspondence, and having an in-house team working on the telephone correspondence. With more considerations and more demand, eBay can set up an overseas office to handle customers on the phone.