In 1995, on September 3. Pierre Omidyar, an Iranian-American computer programmer who was born in France, created a website where people could buy and sell refurbished or otherwise previously used goods. He did it as a pastime.
When his site started getting popular, he had to pay an extra $250 each year to host it.
Instead of footing the bill himself, he had users chip in a small listing fee (10 back then, 25 currently) and a percentage of the item’s ultimate sale price.
Those modest installments snowballed into payments of $1,000 the first month, $2,500 the second, $5,000 the third, $10,000 the fourth, etc.
It’s January 1997. Eight times as many auctions as in 1996 were held on the site.
A month and a half ago, in September 1997. Omidyar’s original option for a new domain name, echobay.com, was also taken, so he settled on the shorter version, eBay.com. The business is now known as eBay.com.
In 1997, when eBay was looking for capital, Bessemer Venture Partners turned them down with the comment, “Stamps? Coins? Comics, huh? You’ve got to be joking, this is a slam dunk.
Benchmark Capital invested $6.7M in eBay.
March 1998. Recruited a new head honcho to take over as president and CEO. The business had 30 workers, 500,000 customers, and $4.7 million in revenue.
In 1998, on September 21. The eBay stock market debut was a success. Suddenly, the company’s founder was worth a billion dollars.
Benchmark Capital received a return of 50,000% on an investment it made in eBay a year ago.
eBay has acquired 53 different businesses (auction sites, marketplaces, ecommerce platforms, etc.) since 1998.
In the 2000s, eBay increased its selection of products to include nearly anything that could be bought and sold online.
It was in the month of October in 2002. This firm has acquired PayPal.
2005. eBay spent $2.5 billion to acquire Skype and $8.5 billion to sell it to Microsoft in 2011.
The value of eBay as of 2017 is $36.6 billion.
Source: en.wikipedia.org