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eBay:
The First 10 Years |
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eBay: The First 10 Years.
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 - 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.
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. |