eBay: The First 10 Years.

By: Dan BEal

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.

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Dan Beal is an independent business consultant and a
personal instructor for learning how to publish your own
newsletter.for more information go to
http://www.danbeal.com/products.htm or email Dan at
webmaster@danbeal.com

This article may be reprinted freely as long as the
reference box remains intact.