Auction eZine - Issue 21
________________________________________________ AuctionInsights Newsletter ________________________________________________ Issue 21 September 1, 2005 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Hi, Happy Birthday eBay!!! The website we now know as eBay launched over labor day weekend in 1995 - 10 years ago. As eBay enters the double digits, I thought would be appropriate to reflect on how it all started with a short article by the author of "Garage Sale Strategies for eBay Success," Robbin K. Tungett. Enjoy, Doug http://www.auctioninsights.info http://AuctionLink.to -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Search thousands of wholesale suppliers and dropshippers with our new wholesale & Drop Ship database. It's FREE!! Click: http://www.auctioninsights.info/wholesale -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- o FEATURED ARTICLE... eBay: The First 10 Years by Robbin K. Tungett Yes, you read that correctly: ten years. eBay was created in September 1995, by a man called Pierre Omidyar, who was living in San Jose. He wanted his site -- then called ‘AuctionWeb' -- to be an online marketplace, and wrote the first code for it in one weekend. It was one of the first websites of its kind in the world. The name ‘eBay' comes from the domain Omidyar used for his site. His company's name was Echo Bay, and the ‘eBay AuctionWeb' was originally just one part of Echo Bay's website at ebay.com. The first thing ever sold on the site was Omidyar's broken laser pointer, which he got $14 for. The site quickly became massively popular, as sellers came to list all sorts of odd things and buyers actually bought them. Relying on trust seemed to work remarkably well, and meant that the site could almost be left alone to run itself. The site had been designed from the start to collect a small fee on each sale, and it was this money that Omidyar used to pay for AuctionWeb's expansion. The fees quickly added up to more than his current salary, and so he decided to quit his job and work on the site full-time. It was at this point, in 1996, that he added the feedback facilities, to let buyers and sellers rate each other and make buying and selling safer. In 1997, Omidyar changed AuctionWeb's -- and his company's -- name to 'eBay', which is what people had been calling the site for a long time. He began to
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spend a lot of money on advertising, and had the eBay logo designed. It was in this year that the one-millionth item was sold (it was a toy version of Big Bird from Sesame Street).
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Then, in 1998 -- the peak of the dotcom boom -- eBay became big business, and the investment in Internet businesses at the time allowed it to bring in senior managers and business strategists, who took in public on the stock market. It started to encourage people to sell more than just collectibles, and quickly became a massive site where you could sell anything, large or small. Unlike other sites, though, eBay survived the end of the boom, and is still going strong today. 1999 saw eBay go worldwide, launching sites in the UK, Australia and Germany. eBay bought half.com, an Amazon- like online retailer, in the year 2000 -- the same year it introduced Buy it Now -- and bought PayPal, an online payment service, in 2002. Pierre Omidyar has now earned an estimated $3 billion from eBay, and still serves as Chairman of the Board. Oddly enough, he keeps a personal weblog at http://pierre.typepad.com. There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay -- that's a lot of laser pointers. About the Author Robbin K. Tungett is online marketing and eBay veteran of 8 years. She is most widely known for her eBay expertise and her website http://www.AuctionRiches.com/. Please visit her blog at http://www.AuctionHerald.com/. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Snipe eBay auctions for FREE! Click: http://www.auctioninsights.auctionstealer.com -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ---------------------------------------- Garage Sale Strategies for eBay Success: ---------------------------------------- "The eBay Seller's Guide to Finding Profitable Hidden Bargains at Garage Sales" http://auction223.first.hop.clickbank.net Are you interested in using garage sales as a source of finding items to resell on eBay? Do you go to garage sales and have no clue what items you should be buying to resell on eBay? Take the guesswork out of garage saling! Grab a copy of Garage Sales Strategies to print and keep as a handy reference in your car so you'll always know what products and name brands you should be looking for! Find out more at: http://auction223.first.hop.clickbank.net -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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