eBay, a Chronology of Success

EBay: A chronology of success.

1995 September, eBay was founded, by a man called Pierre Omidyar. He started a site called ‘AuctionWeb’ as an online marketplace, and wrote the first code for it in one weekend from his garage. This was one of the very pioneer’s auctions websites 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.

1996 It was at this point, that the feedback was added, to let buyers and sellers rate each other and make buying and selling a Little bit safer.

1997, AuctionWeb’s – and Echo Bay disappear and became ‘eBay’, which is the name that 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 a toy version of Big Bird from Sesame Street was sold as the one millionth item.

1998 was known as the year of the dotcom boom. EBay became a big fish in the internet world, big guys on management and strategies were call to action. A public offer on the stock market encourage the people to sell more than collectables and son eBay became the place where you can sell anything large or small. At the end of the dotcom boom many sites face his annihilation due to their condition of dotcom bubbles but eBay survived becoming stronger.

1999 eBay go worldwide, launching sites in the UK, Australia and Germany. eBay bought half.com, an Amazon-like online retailer.

2000 eBay introduced Buy it Now

2002 eBay bought PayPal, an online payment service

2006 eBay opened eBay Express which was created as a regular internet shopping site, but it was closed on 2008 because people used to bought selected items from eBay and mirrored on eBay Express with a standar price.

2008  eBay announced the unveiling of their Selling Manager Applications programme (SM Apps). The programme will allow approved developers to integrate their applications directly in the eBay.com interface

2008, the company had expanded worldwide, counted hundreds of millions of registered users, 15,000+ employees and revenues of almost $7.7 billion. After nearly ten years at eBay, Whitman made the decision to enter politics. On January 23, 2008 the company announced that Whitman would step down on March 31, 2008 and John Donahoe was selected to become President and CEO. Whitman remained on the Board of Directors and continued to advise Donahoe through 2008.

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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?

>>> If you want to learn how to start an eBay business click Here

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