Early eBay
The person-to-person auction era before storefronts and one-click checkout. You photographed your own stuff with a grainy digital camera, hand-wrote the listing in janky HTML, and mailed a check to a stranger whose feedback score was the only thing telling you they could be trusted. Half the thrill was a last-second bidding war; the other half was the box arriving at all.
Pierre Omidyar launched the site as AuctionWeb on September 3, 1995, as a hobby to make a little extra money. One of the first things sold was a broken laser pointer, which went for $14.83 — the buyer, it turned out, collected broken laser pointers. In September 1997 the company renamed itself eBay, a shortening of Omidyar's consulting firm Echo Bay Technology Group (echobay.com was already taken).
Every listing was a small act of trust between strangers. You found something in your closet, photographed it, described its flaws (or didn't), and set a starting bid. Payment meant mailing a personal check or money order and waiting for it to clear before anything shipped — instant online payment was still years off. The running tally of feedback, a column of green stars, was the entire reputation system holding the whole thing together. Beanie Babies became an outright obsession on the platform, accounting for 10% of all listings in 1997.
In September 1998 eBay went public on NASDAQ at $18 a share and closed its first day at $53, a market cap near $1.9 billion. It acquired PayPal on October 3, 2002 for roughly $1.5 billion in stock, and as instant payment, fixed "Buy It Now" prices, and professional storefronts took over, the ramshackle charm of the early auction quietly faded — the digicam photos, the hand-coded listings, the mailed check, and the specific agony of watching someone outbid you in the final ten seconds.
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