eBay was founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar spent an entire Labor Day weekend writing code for the website on his home computer. At the time, it was called AuctionWeb. In 1997 the AuctionWeb brand officially retired. At that time eBay hosted more than 200,000 individual auctions per month, compared to 250,000 auctions in the entire year of 1996.
eBay has acquired many companies in its lifetime. One of the largest is PayPal which was acquired by eBay in 2002. In 2007, eBay had 85.3 million global active users while PayPal had 57.3 million global active registered accounts. In 2010 that number for eBay has grown to 94.5 million, and for PayPal it has grown to 94.4 million.
Companies such as Amazon also have a large e-commerce presence; however they operate differently. They don’t provide bidding options for buyers and sellers. The concept of bidding on an item is quite unique especially in a worldwide online marketplace. eBay provides buyers with the ability to bid on items and sellers with the ability to put items up for bids; at the same time it provides buyers and sellers with options such as “Buy it Now”, where buyers can purchase the item for a set price, and sellers can set the price of the item at what they think is fair. eBay is a game changer because it has revolutionized the concept of e-commerce. It has truly grasped the concept of selling online worldwide.
Works Cited:
History - eBay Inc. (1995-2012). Retrieved April 18, 2012, from eBay Inc.: http://www.ebayinc.com/history
Image of eBay's logo retrieved by doing an "Advanced" Google Image Search, and selecting "free to use or share" in the "usage rights" section.
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