The Rise of eBay

Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 7:56 am

Yes, you read that correctly: ten years. eBay was created in September 1995, by a man called Pierre Omidyar, who was living in San Jose. He wanted his site – before it was called ‘AuctionWeb’ – to be an online marketplace, and wrote the first code and made its website design for it in one weekend. It was one of the first few websites of its kind in the entire world. The name ‘eBay’ comes from the domain Omidyar used for his site.The name of his company was Echo Bay and the ‘eBay AuctionWeb’ was originally just one part of Echo Bay’s webpage 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, curiously,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. In that same year marked the one millionth item that was sold (it was a toy version of Big Bird from Sesame Street).

In the year 1998 – the peak of the dotcom boom – eBay became a business giant, 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. People were encouraged to sell more than 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.

By 1999, eBay went worldwide, launching sites in the UK, Australia and Germany. Also, eBay bought half.com, an Amazon-like retailer and in the year 2000, they introduced Buy it Now and bought Paypal, an online payment service.

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. Every day, all over the world, there are millions of items bought and sold on eBay. 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 know the history of eBay, perhaps you’d like to know how it could work for you? Our next email will give you an idea of the possibilities.