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eBay To Offer Health Insurance
Logic Bomb writes "EBay has announced it will be offering group health coverage for "full time eBay merchants". Anyone who grosses over $1000/month in sales -- at least a whopping 80,000 users in good standing -- will be eligible to buy into a typical "employee" health plan. This is a big first in the Internet world. Full details from the LA Times." And the LA Times, trying to cop a pose from the NY Times, reqs a login.
I think we're seeing the eventual effects of the web that were severely disturbed by the dot-boom(bomb) phenomenon. Ebay is unquestionably _the_ online auction website and its full time merchants generate a significant amount of revenue for ebay. This further increases the incentive for many of these "marginal" merchants to go full time -- they can drop the job that they may have "just for the benefits" and furthermore, it may make dealing with some of Ebay's idiosyncracies a bit more palateable. About time! Hopefully, ebay will set a nice precedent for the rest of the industry.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
as a small business trying to operate mainly on eBay (for credit card purposes), this is another step in proving how corporate they have become, and another step in eliminating the small sellers, which was the whole purpose of eBay to begin with, the access to COLLECTIBLES not mass-produced merchandise.
I think you missed a key point - It's only sellers who gross over $1k/month that eBay is offering this too, not eBay's entire userbase.
eBay takes a commission from every sale - So those sellers are far, far beyond even paying customers at many sites as far as the revenue they bring into the company.
Meanwhile, Yahoo and MSN are free services, or if they charge, they don't charge nearly as much as the amounts of commissions eBay skims from the qualifying classes of sellers.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
So, if you offer them a large customer base, 80,000 people, then that's a big enough market you start to drop your prices signifigantely
Yup. Admittedly, not all of the people eligible will opt for this insurance -- either they have their own insurance already and eBay's offering isn't better, or they apply and the insurer turns them down due to liability issues (this is why it's critical to always have health insurance in the US -- once you are uninsured for 6 months you can be declined for just about any reason... or you can be insured and "preexisting conditions" will simply be declined coverage).
This will be an interesting precident to set in the marketplace of health insurance
Yup... to call a seller an employee of eBay is something of a stretch, but apparantly they have found an insurer who is willing to try. Kudos. And they're willing to test some very murky legal waters here -- once you offer health insurance for these pseudo-employees, you may discover that the federal government is going to start expecting more from you -- even if it's just forms stating that these people are contractors and that you aren't responible for their FICA and Federal taxes. What about FMLA? What about disability? There's a lot more here than meets the eye in my opinion.
Whose going to manage these benefits? Will eBay have a new department for assisting their people with benefit claims?
In theory, HR does this. If eBay has any clue, however, they'll be using a 3rd party administration service to provide these benefits. They're the ones that actually handle the interface between employees and the health plan -- all your HR does is forward them whatever you hand HR. These are popular nowadays because they significantly reduce the paperwork that HR has to deal with.
Anyone else think there's a web-organization that can claim more members?
That's easy. AOL.
This I feel is the start of the second Internet boom, just this one will be for real. All the companies with no hope of making a profit online are gone. The ones that are left either make money, or at least have a pile of cash they are sitting on.
Buying your couch online is out...earth to owner, couches cost A LOT more to ship than books, and people want to sit in them first. Commerce on the web that makes sense is in. eBay is probably the first in the second stream of successful internet companies to start gaining attention.
Can't wait to see more real profits from the internet...
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Since I doubt that most of theses sellers declare thier full income from ebay, I wonder if the IRS will attempt to use this to get a listing of thoses people.
Actually, you don't have to be an employee to get group health insurance. There are many instances of "Association" based health plans: Blue Cross/Blue Shield do this often. It lets lawyers, accountants and other self-employeed professionals get group rates by being members of the Bar Association or something similar.
How do you suggest that they "bring back the old eBay service"?
They started a medium that turned out to be wildly popular, and I'm sure that [insert company name here] noticed that a lot of people were turning to eBay to buy the same products. Who can blame them (the company) for auctioning directly on eBay also?
What's eBay supposed to do? Only allow individuals? Hah! I'm sure they have no plans to kill half of their revenue stream anytime in the near future. I say bravo to eBay for proving that it is possible to be profitable on the Internet.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum