All About
Ebay
The History of eBay...the
first 12 years follows.....
eBay: The First 12
Years.
Yes, you read that correctly: twelve years. 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
onlineworldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay -
that's a lot of laser pointers.
| 