Do you know who created eBay and what year it was? It was created by a man named Pierre Omidyar in 1995 in the month of September. Omidyar who was living in San Jose at the time wanted to create an online market place so he wrote the code in one week end and created AuctionWeb. Now the name he used for his domain was called ebay which was part of his companies name Echo Bay. eBay AuctionWeb was just one part of his Echo Bay website at ebay dotcom. Do you know what the first item ever sold on eBay was? It was Omidyars laser pointer which he sold for $14, and it was broken too!
Ebay became very popular in a very short time. Sellers listed all manner of stuff and buyers readilly bought them. During the start there was a large amount of trust involved and it worked pretty well. There was not a lot of maintenance to the site. Omidyar even from the start collected a small fee on each sale. He took this money and used it for expansion. Soon he was making more money from eBay than he was from his job, so he quit his job to work eBay full time. To let buyers and sellers rate each other and to make it a safer arangement, in 1996 he added the feed back feature to eBay.
In the year 1997, the one millionth item, a big toy version of Big Bird from Sesame Street was sold. It was also the year that he officially changed the name of his site and company from AuctionWeb to eBay. He spent a lot of money on advertising and had the eBay logo created. Omidyar changed the name to eBay officially because it was becoming such a brand name and every body was calling it ebay anyway.
In the year 1998 business was realy booming and eBay became a massively huge. It went public on the stock market and ebay hired alot of senior managers and business strategists who handled the public outing. During this time with eBays encouragment, people started to sell a lot more than just collectibles. You could sell just about anything large or small. Where a lot of other doc com companies folded during this time, eBay survived very nicely, and is thriving to this very day.
In 1999 eBay went Global with a vengence. The UK, Austrailia, and Germany were launched that year. eBay purchased an Amazon type of online retailer called half dotcom. In 2000 they brought in the enormously popular feature Buy It Now to great successs. In 2002 eBay purchased the scandle ridden payment processor PayPal, to the relief of most of the internet. PayPal has became a lot more reputable under eBays ownership. During its pre eBay ownership, PayPal was often accused of freezing peoples accounts taking members money and never giving it back for no particular reason.
Pierre Omidyar still serves as the Chairman of the Board at eBay and has personally earned billiions from eBay. He has tried to keep a smattering of blogs around the net, one of which you can find at pierre.typepad dotcom. This has been a brief historical venture down eBays memory lane. Now a days, there is millions of items bought and sold on eBay every day on just about every corner of the planet. It is estimated that for every $100 spent online, $14 of it was spent on eBay. That is a tremendous amount of money for a business that started out as a small one man operation.
If you are interested in learning more about how you can get into buying and selling on eBay there are tons of courses, books and ebooks available. eBays own site has a tremendous resource catalog of tutorials and videos. So if you have ever wanted to venture in the lucrative world of eBay, now is as good a time as any. Good luck and happy selling and buying on eBay.
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Please visit our site eBay Help for more detailed information and videos and also Questions and Answers our main site on other topics.
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