History of ebay and current status

Mr. Pierre Omidyar is the founder of ebay. He designed it in the age of 29 on September of 1995 and started in California. Pierre was born in France but he is an Iranian. His aim is to develop online shopping store. Therefore he firstly named this as "Auction Web".

First sale is a broken laser pointer and it sold for 14.83 dollars. He put this on his web only for checking the activity of his web. He wondered with the sale of it. He send a message to the buyer that it is a broken laser pointer only. But the buyer replied that "it's OK. I am a collector of broken laser pointers".

At the beginning he developped this web only for his hobby. But with the increasing of viewers the hosting provider informed him to go for a more larger package with more higher price. With the increasing of such costs, Pierre decided to get some money from the users for the services. And appointed Chris Agarpao as his first employee. Sometimes later Jeffrey Skoll joined with Pierre as the business partner.

In the year of 1996 they have done 250,000 sales transactions. After the end of that year Pierre made an agreement with Electronic Travel Auction company and started to sell air tickets. That is the major milstone Pierre first passed. Because of this they did over 2 million sales in the month of January 1997. Second milstone is passed in the end of that year, they re-named their web as ebay. 

At the beginning of year 1998 there were 30 employees worked on ebay and over 500,000 users have joined with them. At the end of that year they share the business into the share market and 18 USD named share has been sold to 53.50 USD on the first day. ebay started their first branches in Europe in 1999.

Maxium priced item sold up to now is a luxury ship worth 168 million US Dollars. This was baught by Russian major financier Frank Mulder. Second is a luxury get sold to 4.9 million USD and the third one is a lunch with world's major financier Warren Buffett worth for 2.6 million USD. 

ebay baught paypal in 2002, skype, shopping.com, rent.com in 2005 and StubHub in 2007. They sold the skype again in 2009.

Today ebay is one of the most revenued companies of the world and came to the first place among the online sellers. The greatest competitor of ebay is amazon.

According to the Forbes web data, assets of Pierre Omidyar is 8.9 billion USD on 2015.

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