September of 1995 found Pierre Omidyar, a San Jose resident, creating one of the most famous marketplaces in the world today. ‘AuctionWeb’ was the initial name given by Omidyar to his site, created over a weekend with a perspective on having an online auction site. It was called ‘eBay,’ for Echo Bay, his company’s name, and, at the time, the auction site was only one of the sections of the Echo Bay website located at ebay.com. The very first sale made on the site was a broken laser pointer sold for $14.
Here’s how the eBay marketplace made its way to exponential growth:
Word got around pretty quickly: from the beginning, online sellers of all manner of strange and unusual things were actually managing to sell their items at AuctionWeb. The site operated so effectively through word of mouth and trust alone that it could run with no red tape at all. He had installed a facility to take a small fee on each sale, which soon translated into something that paid more than his salary, so he began to work full time on AuctionWeb. The feedback system was created in 1996, through which buyers and sellers could rate each other, and it thus subsequently made the marketplace even safer.
Rebranding and Extending the Vision
In 1997, the entrepreneur renamed both AuctionWeb and the company to ‘eBay,’ a name that was having a lot of public popularity. He soon launched a mass campaign and even had the logo of eBay designed. That year, it achieved another milestone as well: one million items had been sold on the site – the small version of Big Bird from Sesame Street.
eBay came flooding in as a large corporation in 1998, just at the peak of the dotcom boom. The stellar investment, which was of vast availability, went into all types of internet-oriented businesses and opened up the route for eBay’s employment of senior managers and strategists, smoothing the way for opening up the company into floating it on the stock market. eBay diversified to make people sell on the platform, not just collectibles, but anything, whatever its size. Other than very few dot-com companies, eBay survived the boom and continued to grow ever since.
Expansion Abroad and in Services
By 1999, it had gone international with the opening of sites in the UK, Australia, and Germany, respectively. Another set of strategic acquisitions that the firm pursued concerns the online marketplace platform half.com in 2000, a robotic-controlled auction management business, and the 2002 online payment method PayPal to further cement eBay as the world’s e-market leader.
The Legacy of Pierre Omidyar and eBay Today
It is through such vision and leadership of a man in the character of Pierre Omidyar, that had taken him to a current net value of $3 billion, with him remaining to be the Chairman of the Board. In the meantime, he runs his personal blog at http://pierre.typepad.com. The website has millions of items bought and sold every day from almost every corner of the world. Its estimated share is $14 out of every $100 spent worldwide, underlining how big a player it has become in e-commerce.
Unlock Your Potential on eBay
Now that you’re abreast with the history of eBay, you’re definitely asking yourself: so what for me? In our next email, we’ll give you the ways you can dive in and take advantage of this world marketplace.
Read more : EBay Income Opportunities.
