"eBay: The First 10 Years"

Yes, you read that right: ten years. eBay was founded in september 1995, by a man named Pierre Omidyar, who lived in San Jose. He wanted his site - then known as AuctionWeb '- to an online marketplace, and wrote the first code for it in one weekend. It was one of the first sites of its kind in the world. The name 'eBay' comes from the domain Omidyar used for his site. His company called Echo Bay, and the 'eBay AuctionWeb "was initially only one part of Echo Bay on the web site ebay.com. The first thing ever sold on the site was Omidyar's broken laser pointer, which he got $ 14.

The site quickly became enormously popular, as sellers came to list all sorts of odd things and buyers actually bought. On the basis of trust seemed to work particularly well, and meant that the site could almost be left to itself. The site was designed from the start to collect a small fee on each sale, and it was the money that Omidyar used to pay for the expansion of AuctionWeb. The fees quickly added up to more than his current salary, and so he decided to stop his work and the work on the site full-time. It was at this point, in 1996, he added that the feedback, so that buyers and sellers rate each other and make buying and selling safer.

In 1997, Omidyar changed AuctionWeb's - and his company - called "eBay", which is what the 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 at this year that the one millionth item is sold (it was a toy version of Big Bird from Sesame Street).

Then, in 1998 - the peak of the dotcom boom - eBay is big business, and investment in Internet companies in the period during which they have recourse to the senior management and business strategists, who has in the public on the stock market. It started to encourage people to sell more than just collectibles, and quickly became a huge site where you can sell everything, big or small. Unlike other sites, but eBay survived the end of the tree, and still is strong today.

1999 saw eBay, the whole world, launching sites in the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany. eBay bought half.com, an Amazon-like online retailer, in the year 2000 - the same year introduced now buy - 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 keeps a personal weblog at http://pierre.typepad.com. There are now literally millions of items bought and sold each day on eBay, spread across the world. For every � 100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that 14 dollars 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? Our next e-mail gives you an idea of the possibilities.