The Amazing and Highly Questionable eBay History
Nowadays a stock exchange listed company, eBay was founded in September 1995 by Pierre Omidyar under the name of AuctionWeb which was one year later changed to the current one that makes reference to the San Francisco Bay Area where Pierre Omidyar launched the project. The first attempt seems to have been “echobay”, but since the internet domain was already taken, the shorter version was preferred.
It is said that originally the site was created by the French-Iranian entrepreneur in order to allow his wife to exchange the Pez candy dispensers she was collecting. However, there are voices claiming this story is not true. They pretend the starting point was a test for a software program and that the other story was created for public relation purposes two years after the site’s inception.
The very first item sold on eBay for14.83 U.S. dollars was a defective laser pointer. Surprised that a broken item found its buyer so easily, the website’s founder contacted the winning bidder to check if he understood that the laser was defective, but it proved to be exactly what the buyer needed as he was a collector of this kind of items. From this point onwards, carried by the boom of the Internet and by the rapid development of the electronic commerce, this concept gain rapidly popularity and became not only a huge commercial success, but also a society phenomenon.
During the year of 1996, eBay hosted a quarter of a million objects put on sale by their holders. The number increased by almost ten thousands times the next year. If in 2004, its turnover was of three billion dollars, in 2006, the company headquartered in San Jose, Silicon Valley had 11.000 employees and in 2011, the number of items sold since the site’s creation exceeded 45 billion.
