EBay's first sale was a broken laser pointer bought by a collector of them
In 1995 a programmer put up a hobby auction site, and one of its first items was a laser pointer that no longer worked. It fetched 14.83 dollars. Puzzled, the seller checked the buyer knew it was broken; the buyer said he collected broken ones. That hobby site became eBay.
Pierre Omidyar, a French-born Iranian-American programmer, launched AuctionWeb on 3 September 1995 as a side project to earn some extra money. It grew so quickly that by February 1996 his internet provider insisted on a business account, raising his monthly bill from 30 to 250 dollars, and the site took in 1,000 dollars in its first month of charging. Jeffrey Skoll came on as the first president in early 1996, and within 14 months of launch the site had hosted more than 200,000 auctions.
The eBay name arrived in September 1997. Omidyar wanted to use Echo Bay, the name of his consulting firm, but a gold mining company already owned echobay.com, so he shortened it. That year the venture firm Benchmark invested 6.7 million dollars, and Beanie Babies, scarce in toy shops, made up about 10 per cent of listings, as collectors found eBay far easier to search than the maker's own trading page.
Meg Whitman became chief executive in March 1998, when the company had just 30 staff, 500,000 users and 4.7 million dollars in US revenue. That September it went public at the height of the dot-com boom; shares priced at 18 dollars closed their first day at 53, valuing the business near 1.9 billion. Acquisitions came fast: Half.com, a South Korean auction site, France's iBazar, PayPal for 1.4 billion dollars in 2002, a quarter of Craigslist, Skype for 2.6 billion, and the ticket reseller StubHub.
Not every push worked. EBay withdrew from Japan in 2002 against Yahoo Japan, and in China its 85 per cent share after buying EachNet in 2003 collapsed to 7.7 per cent within four years as Alibaba's Taobao grew, leading it to shut its Chinese site in 2007. Today, based in San Jose, it serves 190 markets through auctions and instant Buy It Now sales, taking a commission from sellers.
Source: EBay
