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eBay Inc., located in San Jose, California, is an American global e-commerce organization that enables consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer purchases through its website. Pierre Omidyar launched eBay in 1995, and it quickly became a renowned dot-com success story. As of 2019, eBay is a multibillion-dollar company with operations in around 32 countries. The corporation runs the eBay website, which is an online auction and shopping platform where people and companies from all over the world can buy and sell a wide range of goods and services.

Buyers can access the site for free, but sellers must pay to list products once a certain number of free listings have been used, and then again when those items are sold.

eBay has grown and expanded beyond its initial auction-style sales to offer fast “Buy It Now” buying, shopping by Universal Product Code, ISBN, or other form of SKU number (through Half.com, which was shut down in 2017), and other services. eBay used to provide online money transfers (through PayPal, which was a completely owned subsidiary of eBay from 2002 to 2015), online classified ads (via Kijiji, or eBay Classifieds Group), and online event ticket trading as part of its services (via StubHub).

On September 3, 1995, French-born Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar launched the AuctionWeb as part of a bigger personal site in California. A damaged laser pointer was one of the first goods to sell on AuctionWeb for $14.83.

Omidyar was taken aback and phoned the winning bidder to inquire whether he realized the laser pointer was broken; the buyer answered, “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.” It quickly rose to prominence as the first online auction service to offer person-to-person transactions.

According to reports, eBay was just a pastime for Omidyar until his Internet service provider warned him that owing to his high website traffic, he would need to upgrade to a corporate account. The monthly price rise from $30 to $250 drove him to start charging eBay customers, who did not resist. eBay’s first extra employee to process postal check payments was Chris Agarpao.

In early 1996, Jeffrey Skoll was recruited as the company’s first new president. In November 1996, the E-Commerce platform signed its first third-party license agreement, with a firm named Electronic Travel Auction, to offer aircraft tickets and other travel items using SmartMarket Technology. From 250,000 auctions in 1996 to 200,000 in January 1997 alone, growth was remarkable.

In September 1997, the company changed the name of its service from AuctionWeb to eBay, after Omidyar’s consulting firm, Echo Bay Technology Group. A gold mining firm already had the domain name echobay.com, so Omidyar shortened it to eBay.com. Benchmark Capital, a venture capital firm, invested $6.7 million in the company in 1997.

The notion that eBay was formed to let Omidyar’s fiancée trade Pez candy dispensers was made up by public relations manager Mary Lou Song in 1997 to provide the media a human-interest tale that was more appealing to the media than Omidyar’s initial concept of a “perfect market.” The Pez dispenser legend produced a lot of buzz and resulted in a lot of early growth among toy collectors.

Beanie Babies, created by Ty, Inc., soon rose to the top of the toy category, becoming the most difficult toys to locate in retail stores. Ty created the first business-to-consumer Web site, a secondary-market online trading post where consumers could trade their Beanie Babies, while collectors across the world tried to complete their collections of Beanie Babies.

However, it was overloaded with unsortable listings, generating an urgent demand for a more effective online trading system. Beanie Babies immediately became eBay’s most popular product, accounting for 10% of all listings in 1997, as collectors flocked to the site’s user-friendly layout to look for specific Beanie Babies.

In March 1998, the board of directors appointed Meg Whitman as president and CEO of eBay. The firm had 30 employees, half a million customers, and $4.7 million in sales in the United States at the time.

eBay went public on September 21, 1998. Omidyar mentions eBay’s reliance on the sustained growth of the Beanie Babies industry in the risk factors section of his annual report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 1998. Both Omidyar and Skoll became immediate millionaires once eBay went public: the company’s target price of $18 per share was largely ignored, as the stock rose to $53.50 on the first day of trading.

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