The History of eBay
For years, the history of eBay was depicted as the saga of a Pez collector who wanted to found a new place where Pez collectors could get together and trade their dispensers.
That revisionist history was created by a PR team who instructed eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to recount this history for its romantic PR value. The first item ever sold on eBay, the story went, was a Pez dispenser.
Not so, as eBay founder Omidyar admitted years later. The first item ever sold on the online auction giant was a broken laser pointer in 1995. At that time, eBay was a domain name for Omidyar's website that was named after his consulting company, Echo Bay. The site was not, however, primarily an auction site. The auction portion was an afterthought and was named AuctionWeb.
eBay Inc. is Born
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