THE BIRTH OF eBAY- ebay secrets

eBay is an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide. In addition to its original U.S. website, eBay has established localised websites in thirty other countries.

If you look at eBay today, you could never imagine that it had a very modest and in fact comical beginning. One may have noticed that the internet world involves a lot of glamour of big entrepreneurial firms and huge capital investments. eBay does not however has any such history. Instead, eBay can be traced back to only a home page and a broken laser point.

Somewhere around September 1995, Pierre Omidyar, a 28 year old software developer, who had previously worked for Apple computers, started writing a code that eventually evolved into what we know as eBay today.

eBay was originally called AuctionWeb. It was hosted on the same server as Pierre’s page about the Ebola virus. The site began with listing of a single broken laser pointer. Pierre had intended the listing to be a test more than a serious offer to sell at auction. Pierre knew that he had initiated something big as soon as he contacted the winning bidder to ask if he understood that the pointer was broken. The bidder replied that he was a collector of broken laser points.

AuctionWeb soon took over the entire domain of Pierre, www.ebay.com. eBay is the short form of echo Bay, which was the name of the consulting firm at that time. In a year’s time, Jeffrey Skoll, a Stanford MBA, came aboard an already profitable ship. Meg Whitman soon followed as President and CEO, along with a strong business team under whose leadership eBay grew rapidly. eBay’s vision for success transitioned from one of commerce to one of connecting people all over the world together.

With the speedy growth and strong branding, eBay thrived, eclipsing many of the other auction sites.