Nobody ever said anything about jolly. But Whitman is as close as e-commerce gets to a Santa Claus figure this holiday season, and if anybody has the right to a few belly laughs, it may be her.

As Yahoo! struggles to make an Internet buck and Amazon.com teeters toward profitability, eBay's Whitman has delivered to the Internet world a gift still prominent on Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos' and Yahoo's board member Tim Koogle's wish lists: An online business model that works. Like crazy.

Stock reports show eBay's third-quarter profits were up 24 percent over the same quarter last year, to $18.8 million. Whitman's customers bought and sold more than $2.36 billion worth of trinkets and treasures - from Sinatra memorabilia to SUVs - between July 1 and Sept. 30. While sales lagged during the two weeks after Sept. 11, they recovered rapidly to pre-September levels. And analysts are forecasting better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings as customers log on in droves to do their holiday shopping. Whitman herself predicts that eBay will more than triple its annual revenues to $3 billion by 2005. Ho ho ho.

Making History

In a world of economic recession, terrorist alerts, and dot-com disappointments, Whitman's is a welcome tale of good fortune, good management, and good luck.

A 1979 graduate of Princeton University (B.A. in economics) with an MBA from Harvard, Whitman's career path took her from brand management at Procter & Gamble to consulting at Bain & Co., and then on to Disney, where she opened the first Disney stores in Japan (Disney is the parent company of ABCNEWS.com). From there, she moved to StrideRite shoes, then to Florists' Transworld Delivery (FTD), first as president and later as CEO, and finally to Hasbro's Playskool Division, a company with 600 employees and $600 million in annual sales.

When a Silicon Valley headhunter called her in November 1997, Whitman had little interest in moving to an online auction house founded by a guy to help a friend track down Pez dispensers. It was a company with 19 employees, a black-and-white Web site, and a good idea.

It was also a business concept tailor-made for the Internet. EBay is a marketplace without merchandise, a company that sells connections, not inventory. Users own, present and sell their own goods - and every time they do, eBay gets a cut. Talk about a scheme made in e-sales heaven. Whitman recognized the opportunity, left Playskool, and signed on. Four months later, she helped take the company public.

Visions of ...

Since then, eBay has emerged as a dot-com miracle: it makes a profit. Reliably. Consistently. Every single year. And fans and critics alike acknowledge that it's Whitman's aggressive identification of new partners, e-commerce competitors, and market opportunities that has driven her company to its status as the most successful e-business online.

These days, Whitman is looking at new markets and new products. She's expanding eBay into Europe, Korea and New Zealand, and the site has begun selling wine.

It's a market worth billions if eBay can figure out how to maneuver the complexities of alcohol sales across state lines. Other online retailers - including Wine.com and Amazon-partner WineShopper.com - have tried and failed.

But they didn't have eBay's revenue streams, brand loyalty, and established community of shoppers. And they didn't have Whitman, with visions of $3 billion in revenues dancing in her head.

A teacher and a journalist, Dianne Lynch is the author of Virtual Ethics.

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