From laser pointer to empire in 20 years
Auction website eBay has grown from humble beginnings to a phenomenon. James Titcomb reveals some of the highlights of its journey
EBAY celebrated its 20th birthday on Thursday. One of the web’s early darlings survived the dotcom crash and has grown relentlessly since its humble beginnings on September 3 1995, just days after Windows 95 launched. Here are 20 things you may not know about eBay: It was originally called AuctionWeb
Computer programmer Pierre Omidyar established eBay in September 1995, but it wasn’t called that. The site, started as a hobby by Omidyar, was given the much more straightforward AuctionWeb title.
It did not change its name until 1997. The first item sold was a broken laser pointer
And it cost $14.83. Astonished, Omidyar contacted the buyer to ensure he was aware it was unusable.
“I’m a collector of broken laser pointers,” the buyer responded. The name came about because EchoBay was taken
While the “e” prefix is associated with lots of internet activity — e-mail, e-commerce and e-gaming — this wasn’t the inspiration for eBay.
Omidyar’s consulting group, Echo Bay Technology Group, tried to register echobay.com, but this was taken by a mining company, Echo Bay Mines.
So the proposed name was shortened to eBay, and stuck. If you’d invested £1 000 in eBay’s initial public offering, you’d have more than £84 000 (about R1.743-million) today
eBay listed in September 1998 at $18 a share. Despite a blip in the dotcom boom, it has been a corporate monster.
Shares have been split and investments spun off, but according to Bloomberg data taking this into account, they have risen by 84.5 times since its IPO. Sales on eBay outstrip Cuba’s GDP
Last year, $82.95-billion (about R1.1-trillion) changed hands on eBay, according to its annual report. Only 62 countries have a bigger economy than this. eBay’s marketplace sales are bigger than Cuba, Libya and Croatia’s economies. The first item sold in the UK was a Scorpions CD
ebay.co.uk opened in 1999, four years after the website emerged in the US.
The first thing sold in the UK was a CD, You & I, from German rock band Scorpions. It sold for £2.89. Britons use eBay more than any other country
While eBay came to the UK late, it has been embraced enthusiastically by Brits.
More than 19 million Brits visit eBay every month and buy more items per capita than anywhere else in the world. William Shatner sold a kidney stone on eBay
Trekkies are Trekkies. Online casino Goldenpalace.com paid $25 000 for the Star Trek actor’s kidney stone in 2006.
Shatner, who was raising money for charity, said at the time: “This takes organ donors to a new height, to a new low.” The most expensive item sold on eBay was a yacht
In 2006, a 405-foot yacht with a helipad and movie theatre, designed by Frank Mulder, was sold on eBay for $168-million.
This easily outstrips the second-most expensive, a $4.9-million private jet. Most items on eBay are ‘Buy It Now’ items
eBay started life as an auction website and is still known as one, but most items sold on it use the “Buy It Now” feature.
According to 2013 research, only 15% of items sold are for auction only. New species have been discovered on eBay
In 2006, a Montana-based seller put a sea urchin from the Pacific Ocean on eBay, but it was of a type nobody had seen before.
Simon Coppard of the Natural History Museum realised the urchin had been mislabelled as an already discovered species. He gave it the name Coelopleurus exquisitus. The average user goes on eBay every four days
And spends more than an hour on the site a month, three times more than the average of the US’s top 100 internet retailers, according to the company.
In the US, the average unique user goes to eBay seven times a month for about 75 minutes per month. About 800 million items are on eBay at any one time
eBay does not actually say how many items are sold on its website every year, but 800 million are listed at any one time.
It also sold $20.1-billion of items in the second quarter of the year. That is $2 556 a second. A surprising number of places have been sold
The California town of Bridgeville, the original Hollywood sign and the Thatch Cay Virgin Island have all been sold on eBay.
Other attempts have been less successful. An Australian man who tried to sell New Zealand saw his listing closed down when it reached A$3 000, while one listing for Iceland during the financial crisis reached £10-million. Prayers, magic potions and souls are banned
As are human body parts, ivory and a person’s virginity.
eBay’s lengthy list of banned items also includes Nazi memorabilia, lottery tickets and animals. eBay is more than just eBay
As well as the online marketplace, the company also owns ticket exchange StubHub, listings site Gumtree and a 25% stake in Craigslist.
It owned Skype before selling it to Microsoft, and PayPal be-
fore spinning it off this year. eBay has helped lonely hearts find love
A British man and woman were married in 2007, three months after meeting thanks to eBay.
David Jones bought a pair of ornamental birds on the website but apparently fell in love over the internet with the seller — Cheryl Pipes — before they even met. Space agency Nasa once bought things on eBay
One of the best things about eBay is that no matter how niche your taste, it’s probably on sale there.
This even applied to Nasa, which used the site to find outof-production gear it couldn’t source anywhere else. eBay has had physical stores
It seems counterintuitive, but, in 2011, eBay opened a pop-up shop in London.
You couldn’t take anything home, though — it was more of a showroom. Visitors would scan a code on their smartphone, which would take them to an item’s eBay listing. James Blunt tried to sell his sister on eBay once
Really. Well, sort of. The singer’s sister had to get to Ireland for a funeral, and strikes put air travel out of the question.
Blunt turned to eBay, and a helicopter owner came to the rescue. Even better, the winning bidder and Blunt’s sister got married shortly thereafter. — ©