Please help improve this article by expanding this section. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. Please remove this message once the section has been expanded. This article has been tagged since February 2007.

Category killer is a term used in marketing and strategic management to describe a product, service, brand, or company that has such a distinct sustainable competitive advantage that competing firms find it almost impossible to operate profitably in that industry. The existence of a category killer will eliminate almost all market entities, whether real or virtual. Many existing firms will leave the industry, thereby increasing the industry's concentration ratio. Image File history File links Wiki_letter_w. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Marketing Look up marketing in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Marketing In economics and marketing, a service is the non-material equivalent of a good. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Marketing A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Types of corporations. ... Companies that compete by selling similar products (or even substitutes) to the same group of customers constitute an industry. ... Competition is the act of striving against another force for the purpose of achieving dominance or attaining a reward or goal, or out of a biological imperative such as survival. ... The virtual is a concept applied in many fields with somewhat differing connotations, and also denotations. ... In economics, the concentration ratio of an industry is used as an indicator of the relative size of firms in relation to the industry as a whole. ...

An example of a category killer business is eBay. eBay as an online auction site has a natural monopoly, as buyers and sellers will naturally gravitate to the largest, most liquid market. As a result, their business has almost no competition and has forced similar auction sites like the ones run by Yahoo! into a very small portion of the market. eBay now commands over 90% of the consumer-to-consumer auction market.^{[citation needed]} eBay headquarters in San Jose eBay North First Street satellite office campus (home to PayPal) eBay Inc. ... In economics, the term natural monopoly is used to refer to two different things. ... Yahoo! Inc. ...

Another type of category killer, and the definition most associated with the term, is a big box retail chain which is focused on one or few categories of merchandise and offers a wide selection of merchandise in these categories at relatively low prices. The emergence of such stores has taken a toll on many department stores. A big box is a box that is big. ... A Target chain store. ... The interior of a typical Macys department store. ...