Yes, you read that correctly, eBay has been going for more than ten years now. EBay was first created in September 1995, by a man named Pierre Omidyar, who was living in San Jose at the time. He wanted to make his website, which was called ‘AuctionWeb’ at the time to be an online marketplace, and wrote his first batch of code for it within one weekend. It was pretty much, the first website of its kind in the entire world. The eBay comes from the domain that Omidyar used for the website. His company’s name was called Echo Bay and ‘eBay AuctionWeb’ was initially just one aspect of facet of Echo Bay’s website. The first item to be sold on it was Omidyar’s broken laser pointer, which he sold for $14.
The site quickly became massively popular, as sellers came to list all sorts of odd things and buyers actually bought them. Relying on trust seemed to work remarkably well, and meant that the site could almost be left alone to run itself. The site had been designed from the start to collect a small fee on each sale, and it was this money that Omidyar used to pay for AuctionWeb’s expansion. The fees quickly added up to more than his current salary, and so he decided to quit his job and work on the site full-time. It was at this point, in 1996, that he added the feedback facilities, to let buyers and sellers rate each other and make buying and selling safer.
In the year of 1997, Omidyar changed AuctionWeb and his company name to eBay, which is what many people had been calling the site up till then. He started spending larges sums of money on advertising, and had his own eBay logo drawn up. It was in this year that the one millionth items had been sold, it was a toy version of Big Bird from Sesame Street.
Then, in 1998 – the peak of the dotcom boom – eBay became big business, and the investment in Internet businesses at the time allowed it to bring in senior managers and business strategists, who took in public on the stock market. It started to encourage people to sell more than just collectibles, and quickly became a massive site where you could sell anything, large or small. Unlike other sites, though, eBay survived the end of the boom, and is still going strong today.
The year 1999 saw eBay go worldwide launching sites in Australia, Germany and the UK. EBay purchased the company ‘half’, which was an Amazon-like online retailer in the year 2000, that same year the Buy it now facility was introduced and eBay bought PayPal an online payment service in 2002.
Pierre Omidyar has now earned an estimated $3 billion from eBay, and still serves as Chairman of the Board. Oddly enough, he keeps a personal weblog. There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay – that’s a lot of laser pointers.
Now that you’re familiar with the history of eBay, perhaps you’d like to know how it could all work for you.
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