If you've ever read an article about eBay, you will have seen the kinds of revenues people make - it isn't unusual to hear of people making thousands of dollars per month on eBay.

Next time you're on eBay, have a look at how many PowerSellers there are: you'll find quite a few. Now consider that every single one of one of them must be making at least $1,000 per month, as that's eBay's prerequisite for becoming a PowerSeller. Silver PowerSellers make at least $3,000 each month, while Gold PowerSellers make more than $10,000, and the Platinum level is $25,000. The top ranking is Titanium PowerSeller, and to qualify you must make at least $150,000 in sales every month!

The fact that these sellers exist gives you some approximation of the income possibilities present. Many of them never set out to even set up a business on eBay - they simply started selling a few things, and then kept going when they saw how successful they could be. There are plenty of people whose full-time job is selling things on eBay, and some of them have been doing it for years now. Can you imagine that? Once they've acquired the inventory, everything else is pretty much pure profit for these people - they don't need to pay for any business premises, staff, or anything else. Some of them started selling on eBay as an extension of a brick-and-mortar business, then experienced such success that they cut back or closed their brick-and-mortar business. There are multi-million dollar businesses making less in actual profit than eBay PowerSellers do.

Even if you don't want to quit your job and really go for it, you can still use eBay to make a substantial second income. Some eBay sellers partner with drop shippers, eliminating even the need to find inventory to sell and the need to pack and ship. There are few other things you could be doing with your spare time that have anywhere near the kind of earning potential that eBay selling does.

What's more, eBay doesn't care who you are, where you live, or what you look like: some PowerSellers are very old, or very young. Some live out in the middle of nowhere, where selling on eBay is one of the few alternatives to farming or being very poor. eBay tears down the barriers to earning that the real world constantly puts up. There's no job interview and no commuting involved - if you have access to the internet and can follow directions to post items for sale, you can do it.

If you know where to get items for a reasonably low price that you believe have a chance of selling for more than you paid for them, and for which there is a demand, then you can sell on eBay. Educating yourself on what will sell is a key factor in successful eBay income. Knowing how much items will sell for - and therefore how much to pay for them - is also important.

If you want to test the market before you commit to actually buying anything, then you can just sell things that you've got lying around in the house. Search through that cupboard of stuff you never use, and you'll probably find you've got a few hundred dollars' worth of stuff lying around in there! This is the power of eBay: there is always someone who wants what you're selling, whatever it might be, and since they've come looking for you, you don't even need to do anything to get them to buy it. If you don't think you have something you can sell on eBay, try local yard sales.

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eBay was created in September 1995, by Pierre Omidyar, who was then living in San Jose. He wanted his web site - called "AuctionWeb" at that time - to be an online marketplace, and wrote the first code for it in one weekend. It was one of the first web sites 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 web site at ebay.com. The first thing ever sold on the site was Omidyar's broken laser pointer, which he sold for $14.

The site speedily 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 to carry through its purpose without oversight. 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 functionality, to let buyers and sellers rate each other and make buying and selling safer.

In 1997, Omidyar converted 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 the Sesame Street toy line).

Then, in 1998 - the peak of the dot-com boom - eBay became big business. Interest in investment in Internet businesses at the time allowed eBay to bring in senior managers and business strategists, who took the company public on the stock market. People were encouraged to sell more than just collectibles, and it quickly became a massive site where sellers could list anything, large or small, for sale. Unlike other sites, however, eBay survived the end of the boom, and is still going strong today.

The company was only 4 years old in 1999, which 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 maintains a personal blog at http://pierre.typepad.com. There are presently virtually 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.

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