eBay was created in
September 1995, by a man called Pierre Omidyar, who was
living in San Jose. He wanted his site - then called
'AuctionWeb' - to be an online marketplace, and wrote
the first code for it in one weekend. It was one of the
first websites of its kind in the world. The name 'eBay'
comes from the domain Omidyar used for his site. His
company's name was Echo Bay, and the 'eBay AuctionWeb'
was originally just one part of Echo Bay's website at
ebay.com. The first thing ever sold on the site was
Omidyar's broken laser pointer, which he got $14 for.
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 1997, Omidyar changed AuctionWeb's - and his
company's - name to 'eBay', which is what people had
been calling the site for a long time. He began to spend
a lot of money on advertising, and had the eBay logo
designed. It was in this year that the one-millionth
item was 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.
1999 saw eBay go worldwide, launching sites in the UK,
Australia and Germany. eBay bought half.com, an
Amazon-like online retailer, in the year 2000 - the same
year it introduced Buy it Now - and 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 at
http://pierre.typepad.com. 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.
.gif){kind=tracking}
.gif){kind=tracking}
