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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