Ebay started as an online company in September, 1995. It was created by Mr. Pierre Omidyar, who was a resident of San Jose. At first his site was named as the ‘Auction Web’and it was intended to be an online marketing store and was one of the first websites of this kind in the world. Ebay was the domain name used by Omidyar for the site. His company was named as the Echo Bay, which comes from the domain used for his site. Echo Bay and the Ebay Auction Web was just one part of Echo Bay’swebsite at ebay.com. The first thing sold by the site was a broken laser point for $14.

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 Auction Web'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 headded the feedback facilities, to let buyers and sellers rate each other andmake buying and selling safer.

In 1997, Omidyar changed Auction Web's - and his company's - name to 'eBay', which is what people had been calling the site for a long time. He began to 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).

Then, in 1998 -the peak of the dot com 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 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 athttp://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.