The History of eBay

eBay was created in September 1995, by Pierre Omidyar, who wanted his existing website, ‘AuctionWeb’, to be an online marketplace. The name ‘eBay’ comes from his company’s name, ‘Echo Bay’. The site was originally known as ‘eBayAuctionWeb’ and it quickly became extremely popular, as sellers came to list all sorts of items and buyers bought them. ‘eBayAuctionWeb’ was designed to collect a small fee on each sale and the fees soon added up to more than his current salary so he quit his job and began to work on the site full-time. In 1996, he added the feedback facilities to his ‘eBayAuctionWeb’ site that allows buyers and sellers to rate each other on their transaction and makes buying and selling safer as everyone can see how smoothly previous transactions have been completed.

In 1997 ‘eBayAuctionWeb’ became ‘eBay’ and Omidyar invested a significant of money into advertising and the design of the eBay logo. The one-millionth item was sold on eBay soon after. The following year saw the peak of the dotcom boom and internet auctions became big business. The management structure was expanding and the business strategists decided that the time was right to float eBay shares on the stock market. eBay was one of the few internet companies who survived the downturn in dotcom businesses.

Until 1999, eBay was an American-based company but sites were then launched in the UK, Australia and Germany which made it a truly global operation. In 2000 many changes happened to eBay including the acquisition by half.com and PayPal which allowed the sites to introduce the ‘Buy It Now’ feature. Sellers were able to have almost any item listed on eBay where buyers could use a safe method of online payment to buy an item immediately instead of having to wait for the eBay auction to end.

It is thought that Pierre Omidyar has now earned over $3 billion from eBay and he remains Chairman of the Board. There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, in almost every country in the world. The research shows that for every $100 spent online worldwide, $14 is spent on eBay. The company continues to grow and recently completed the acquisition of Skype, an online telephone company.

There have been a number of strange items sold on eBay in the past and some that have had to be withdrawn for legal reasons. The most famous incident was when a seller put his kidney up for auction. More recently the flood of tickets for a charity concert led to the company being forced to withdraw all of the tickets that were up for auction because the charity tickets had been given free via a lottery and the organizers thought that neither eBay nor the seller should profit from them.