To create interest and generate demand for a new product is the challenge for any product manager.

Customers become swamped with special offers as well as test products become insecure by discount-actions and this on a daily basis. The situation makes it more and more difficult to induce excitement within customers with regards to new products and makes it difficult to build long-term relationships with them.

How would it be to reach millions of potential new customers? At a fraction of the acquisition costs usually paid for a single customer?

Online marketplaces such as eBay offer attractive possibilities for operations and interesting ways of introducing and offering a new product to a large number of end-consumers. In Germany alone, eBay has over 11,4 million registered users (status Oct. 2003) and more than 17 million people visit the German website on a monthly basis (source: Nielsen / NetRatings, March 2004).