Origins and early history of eBay

eBay is an American Internet company that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide.


Origins and early history of eBay

The online auction website was founded as "AuctionWeb in San Jose, California, on September 3, 1995, by French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as part of a larger personal site. In 1997, the company received approximately $5 million in funding from the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. (1)

The very first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Astonished, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to ask if he understood that the laser pointer was broken. In his responding email, the buyer explained: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers." eBay went public on September 21, 1998, and both Omidyar and Skoll became instant billionaires. The company purchased PayPal on October 14, 2002. (2)

Competitors of eBay

Amazon.com
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994, it was launched in 1995. Located in Seattle, Washington, Amazon was one of the first major companies to sell goods over the Internet. They quickly shifted into other consumer products and expanded outside of the US. (3)

Google
Google Product Search helps shoppers find and buy products across the web. It works best employing sellers currently established ecommerce sites and then utilizing Google Product Search as a information organizer and checkout tool. Currently this is not an Ebay killer as it displays Ebay results in their search results, however they may choose to further their vertical depth in the future. (4)


Yahoo
You can use Yahoo! Shopping Web Services to search a database of millions of products and thousands of merchants. Yahoo! Shopping operates in a similar way to Google Product Search in that it utilizes a horizontal search structure across pre-established ecommerce websites. (5)

It’s been informative looking at the other sites that are in direct competition with eBay, each of the different sites all have their own individual strengths and weaknesses. Competitors such as Google and Yahoo are not necessarily direct competition to eBay due to the fact they simply list the items relevant to the search- however competitors sites will be listed in their searches.

The next stage is to look at the eBay marketing campaigns and to see how they have marketed themselves previously.

Sources used within this Blog

(1), (2) www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebay
(3), (4), (5) http://www.lightecho.com/index.php/internet-technology/top-10-auction-sites-possible-ebay-killers