Saturday, July 21, 2007

# eBay's Success and Popularity by Matthew Bredel

eBay is the most powerful online marketplace these days. Many of us would wonder how eBay has become a giant in terms of Internet revenues. Of course, every successful company has its humble beginnings. Lets take a look at how eBay has made its way to the top.

It all started in Pierre Omidyars living room, where eBays first office was established. Omidyar, which has a French-Iranian descent, came to America and finished a computer science degree. He had wanted to become a programmer at Macintosh, but luck made him trod along a different road. In his effort to establish an online venue for person-to-person auction of collectible items, Omidyar built the site called AuctionWeb.

Auction Web started as a part of Omidyars larger personal site that talks about Ebola virus. AuctionWeb was just a simple prototype, with Omidyar as the sole proprietor. At that time, Omidyar was working for General Magic, a mobile communications company.

The number of people visiting Omidyars auction site grew more and more each day. He collected small fees on each sale, and he used the revenues to expand the enterprising site. He never imagined that his business will grow into a large-scale online auction website.

In 1996, Omidyar and his partner Jeffrey Skoll thought of renaming AuctionWeb. Their first choice of company name was Echo Bay Technology Group, but the domain echobay.com was already registered to someone else. So they though of cutting it short to ebay.com. eBay was already hosting 800,000 auctions in one day in the summer of 1998. By the end of the year, Omidyar already earned $ 3 billion worth of personal stake in the company.

With the help of Meg Whitman, a Harvard graduate with rich experience in brand-building and business management, eBay established a vast community of individuals and small-scale business from different parts of the world. eBay is not just about getting ones goods sold. The website seeks to foster trust among and between its users; this is the top corporate goal of eBay.

Still, despite the fact that eBay has helped millions of people sell their items with just a few tweaks and clicks, the company never strays away from its goal of building trust among and between its users from all over the world. eBays priority is not just getting people to sell or buy products and services. The companys core interest is to build an online community in which everyone the sellers and the buyers can make the most out of what they have.

Matthew is the creator of TheWebReviewer: Make Money Online Opportunities, and NetWebVideo: Make Money Online Tutorials. Matt currently is located in Southern California and is married with two children and has been an online marketer since 2006.

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