When the creators of what is now the biggest reality of the internet tell how it all began there is one thing they have in common, and it is a phrase similar to “I really had no idea that we would come this far” . Pierre Omidyar, the impenditore Franco-American of Iranian origin who invented eBay, is no exception: what is now one of the world giants of e-commerce was born almost as a joke, exactly 20 years ago .
It was in fact on September 3, 1995 when it was put online AuctionWeb, an online auction site : the first object to be sold, mostly to make a test was a broken laser pointer. Surprisingly, the auction closed at $ 14.83. Omidyar was surprised much of the answer he got when he contacted the buyer to make sure that he understood that the object was not working: “I collect broken laser pointers.”
But a better idea of what were the potential of a similar idea he came only a few months later, when the domain was renamed eBay.com. The provider hosting the site Omidyar contacted to ask him if he was interested in switching to a subscription business, upgrade necessitated by the large traffic that eBay was generating .
The growth was incredibly fast: in early 1996 the company was already so great as to require the recruitment of a president, Jeffrey Skoll. Some partnership allowed him to greatly improve the site from a technical standpoint, and also why in January 1997 eBay was able to accommodate some two million auction .
A successful kind was bound to attract the attention of Wall Street in September 1998, just over three years after the broken laser pointer, was launched the initial public offering of eBay. In the first day of trading, the company’s shares shot up to $ 53.50 compared with a starting price of $ 18 making Omidyar and Skoll billionaires in just a few minutes .
The rest, as they say, is history: Today eBay is one of the leading companies in the world in e-commerce , with net income in 2014 reached almost 18 billion. But if the creature of Omidyar has successfully established itself as one of the most successful yet with a history that began in the era of the dotcom bubble, to continue to remain dominant in the near future will need to defeat a fierce competition than ever.
And we are not talking only of the giants born for e-commerce, such as Amazon or the Chinese Alibaba. To threaten the future of eBay, which many feel weaker after separation with PayPal October last year, are actually consolidated in other areas such as Google and Facebook , which by inserting the button “Buy “pages in their aim to turn into huge digital markets.
It seems clear now that eBay is a giant, with 157 million active buyers and sellers of 25 million can scalzarla from position It has gained in 20 years of work , but in a very dynamic environment such as online businesses, will not be easy.
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