Discover 101 Ebay Tips and Tricks To Increase Your Profits
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 yo