EBay, the First 12 Years

eBay was a pioneer in several ways. The original name of the site was actually "AuctionWeb" and was part of a website called Echo Bay. It was not too long after the launch, that people started calling the site eBay anyway. The first item sold on eBay was Omidyar's broken laser pointer. The managed to sell it for a whopping $14.00!

Ebay become immensely popular very quickly. Sellers came on the site to list all sorts of oddities and more remarkably, buyers actually bought them. At first ebay operated on the honor system as sellers and buyers seem to trust each other. This allowed Pierre to let the site almost run itself.

In 1997, Omidyar changed AuctionWeb's - and his company's - name to 'eBay', which is what users had been calling the site for a long time anyway. Pierre spent a lot of money on advertising, and also redesigned the eBay logo. It was in this year also that ebay sold it's one-millionth item.

In 1998 during the peak of the dotcom boom, eBay became a big business. The money made available to internet investments during this era allowed eBay to bring in senior managers and business strategists, who took the company public. This started to encourage people to sell more than just collectibles, and eBay quickly became a massive website, and a very large business.

To this extent, you you could sell anything, large or small to anyone who could pay for it. Unlike many other websites however, eBay survived the inevitable dot com meltdown, and is still going strong today.

In 1999, ebay expanded worldwide. It launched sites in the UK, Australia and Germany, bought half.com in 2000. Half.com was an online retailer much like Amazon. In 2000 as well, eBay introduced Buy it Now. Ebay also purchased PayPal, an online payment service, in 2002.