eBay

Buy & sell electronics, cars, clothes, collectibles & more on eBay, the world’s online marketplace. Top brands, low prices & free shipping on many items.

Electronics

Fashion

Health and Beauty

Sports

Collectibles, Artworks

Commercial and industrial supplies

Home Gardening

Overseas Shopping

vehicle

Super Value Specials

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On September 4, 1995, Pierre Omidyar founded the Auctionweb website, headquartered in San Jose, California, USA, the predecessor of eBay.

Omidyar’s first item to sell, a broken laser pointer, sold for $14.83, and he asked the winning bidder in surprise, “Don’t you know it’s broken?” Omidia received the following reply: “I’m a player who specializes in collecting broken laser indicators. (A more commonly told story was one that a PR manager fabricated to the media in 1997: eBay was founded to help Omidia’s fiancée exchange some PEZ Candy toys; The story was later revealed in 2002 in Adam Cohen’s book and officially confirmed by eBay.

The truth is not what the story says. In the fourth chapter of YouTube founder Chen Shijun’s autobiography “Making 13 Billion in 20 Months”: Creating YouTube: A Simple Entrepreneurial Story, he mentions at the beginning – Julie Supan, a public relations expert, “Do you think other people’s stories are true? Hear me out, eBay wasn’t created to help founder Omidia’s fiancée exchange some PEZ Candy toys. ”

Jeff Scholar was hired as the company’s first president and full-time employee in 1996. In September 1997, the company officially changed its name to eBay. Initially, the site belonged to Omidyar’s consulting firm, Echo Bay Technology Group. Omidia once tried to register a EchoBay.com URL, only to find that it was already registered by Echo Bay Mining, so he changed the EchoBay.com to his second filing: “Ebay.com”.