Ronnie Bredahl

History of eBay



Posted: Wednesday, May 07, 2008

by
Austin Referral Realty

eBay was founded in September of 1995 by Pierre Omidyar. The site was actually part of a personal website, and was founded for the purpose of assisting Omidyars fiance with trading PEZ dispensers which she collected.

Ebay has not always been called by that name. When the site first began, it was called AuctionWeb. It wasn't until 1997 that it started to be called eBay. The name belonged to Echo Bay, Omidyars consulting firm. They had tried to register the name ECHOBAY.COM but found the name to be taken by Echo Bay Mining Corp. Omidyar then shortened the name to eBay.com

The first item ever sold, was of all things, a broken laser pointer. The piece was sold for a price of $14.83. So astonished was Omidyar, that he contacted the winning bidder, and asked if they understood that the pointer was broken. The bidder's response was that he collected broken laser pointers! This goes to show, that many things are collected by people, and lends credibility to the term, one man's trash is another man's treasure!

Mistakenly called a co-founder, Jeffrey Skoll was hired as the company's first president in 1996. That same year, eBay entered into its first third-party licensing deal. This deal was with a company named Electronic Travel Auction, to use the SmartMarket technology to sell airline tickets and other travel products and services.

On September 21, 1998 eBay went public. What this means, is that the companies stock began trading on the Stock Exchange. Omidyar and Skoll both became billionaires instantly.

The company maintains localized and interconnected versions of the website in more than 30 countries. Trading is completed on a daily basis by millions of people.

In 2002, eBay, inc. acquired Paypal. This now positioned eBay to profit from both the auction fees collected, and for fees collected by handling many of the payment transactions for the items being sold on the site.

Many of the products that are traded on eBay are rare and valuable items, while others are dusty gizmos that may have made their way into the trash, were it not for the many eager buyers that eBay attracts on a daily basis. In 2005, eBay launched the business and industrial categories. Now they were even in the industrial surplus business!

eBay's clientele even includes large international companies, such as IBM, who sell their products and services on eBay using competitive auction prices, and fixed priced storefronts.

In April 2006, eBay launched its eBAY Express service which was designed to be a regular shopping site. Not everyone can sell on eBay Express either. At the time of this writing, eBay required eBay Express sellers to maintain a feedback score of 100 or more as a starting point.

Ebay has other specialty sites as well. These sites include the eBay community Wiki, eBay Blogs, Best of eBay, Skype, and eBay pulse just to name a few. Ebay even owns a percentage of the popular Craig's List!

It's no wonder eBay is among the largest commercial websites of its kind on the internet. You might say that eBay is an internet Icon. Even as large as it is, it continues to grow, and can only grow larger as more and more users pour onto the internet!

Register for eBay Today! Austin Referral Realty is your source for Austin Real Estate. Our Austin Realtors provide free home buyer representation in Austin, Texas and surrounding areas of the Central Texas Hill Country.

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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)
» left by Susan Thom
 3 years 250 days ago.
174 fans.
hi ronnie, i thought this was a well written and interesting article. i never knew any of the facts i read about. thanks for sharing, best regards, sue thom
» left by R.G
from US 3 years 5 days ago.
wow interesting
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