What was the first item ever sold on eBay?
Pierre Omidyar wrote the code for a site he called AuctionWeb over Labor Day weekend in September 1995 and ran it from his home in San Jose, California. To find out whether the thing worked at all, he listed a laser pointer that had stopped working a couple of weeks after he bought it. It sold for $14.83.
Omidyar emailed the winning bidder to make sure there had been no misunderstanding about the word broken. The buyer, a Canadian named Mark Fraser, wrote back that the condition was the point: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers." Fraser identified himself publicly in 2015, around the company's twentieth anniversary, and gave a more practical version of his reasoning. He traveled constantly for work, he wanted a pointer for presentations, working ones cost far more than he was willing to pay, and he was confident he could repair a broken one himself.
Either version makes the same point. There was a buyer for an object with no retail value, and the only thing missing was a place for the two of them to meet. That was a different idea from the first online purchases of the early 1990s, which were ordinary store transactions moved onto a wire.
Did eBay really start with Pez dispensers?
For years the standard telling involved candy. Omidyar, it went, built the site so his fiancee, Pam Wesley, could trade Pez dispensers with other collectors. The version ran in BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, and people still repeat it.
It was invented. Mary Lou Song, eBay's first public relations manager, made it up in 1997 because reporters would not write about the real one. Adam Cohen quoted her reasoning in The Perfect Store, his 2002 history of the company: "Nobody wants to hear about a thirty-year-old genius who wanted to create a perfect market." What they wanted, she judged, was a man who had done something for his fiancee.
The fake story worked exactly as intended. Collectors read it, recognized themselves in it, and showed up to trade. It is worth knowing which story is which, because the Pez version suggests eBay was built for a hobby, and the laser pointer version suggests what Omidyar actually built: a market where strangers set the price of anything, including things nobody had ever priced before.
How did AuctionWeb start charging for listings?
AuctionWeb ran free for its first months. In early 1996 Omidyar's internet provider told him the traffic had outgrown a personal account and he would have to pay business rates, so he added a listing fee and a commission on completed sales to cover the difference. The fees came in faster than the bill did.
That detail separates eBay from almost every company founded in the same window. eBay took a cut of transactions that other people paid for, packed and shipped. It held no inventory, ran no warehouses and employed no drivers, so the cost of serving one more seller was close to nothing.
The contrast with its contemporaries is sharp. Pets.com bought dog food, stored it and shipped it at a loss. Webvan built refrigerated warehouses before it had the orders to fill them. eBay charged a few cents to list and a small percentage to sell, and the model held up for thirty years without a rewrite.
How big did the Beanie Baby trade get on eBay?
Ty Inc. retired its stuffed animal designs deliberately, which turned a five dollar toy into a speculative asset and sent every buyer looking for a resale market. eBay was the resale market.
The scale is easy to underrate. By 1997, Beanie Baby auctions on eBay came to roughly $500 million, more than 6 percent of the company's entire business, according to Mental Floss's account of the mania. During the 1998 holiday season there were stretches when 7 percent of everything listed on the site was a Beanie Baby. eBay's 1998 filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission named the volatility of that one category as a risk to the business, which is an unusual thing for a technology company to tell its investors.
The users mattered more than the money. Beanie Baby speculators were not early adopters. They were suburban parents, retirees and hobbyists who learned to use the web specifically to buy and sell stuffed animals, and who then discovered they could buy and sell everything else. When the Beanie Babies bubble collapsed, the toys went to landfill and the accounts stayed.
How much did eBay's stock jump on its first day?
eBay went public on the Nasdaq on September 24, 1998, priced at $18 a share. It closed the first day at $47.375, a gain of 168 percent, and CNNMoney wrote it up that evening as the return of the internet IPO after a summer of flat offerings.
What sat underneath the pop was unusual for 1998. eBay's own year-end announcement reported net revenues of $47.4 million for 1998, an increase of 724 percent over the $5.7 million it took in during 1997, and net income of $2.4 million. A profitable internet company was close to a contradiction in terms that year.
Meg Whitman had been hired as chief executive in March 1998, and her main contribution was not technical. She formalized the feedback system, the two-way rating both sides of a sale leave for each other. In a market where you mailed a money order to a stranger for an item you had never seen, a public score for past behavior did the work that a store's reputation does offline. Every marketplace built since, from ride hailing to short term rentals, runs on some version of it.
Who owns eBay today, and is it still in business?
eBay is still in business, and no one person owns it. The company has been publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker EBAY since its September 1998 listing, and its largest holders are institutional index managers such as Vanguard and BlackRock rather than any individual or parent company. Jamie Iannone has been chief executive since April 2020.
The 2025 numbers are not those of a fading site. eBay reported $79.6 billion in gross merchandise volume for the full year, up 7 percent, revenue of about $11.1 billion, and 135 million active buyers worldwide as of December 31, 2025.
What changed is the merchandise. eBay lost general shopping to Amazon years ago and stopped fighting for it, concentrating instead on collectibles, trading cards, refurbished electronics, car parts and secondhand fashion, the categories where buyers want a specific object rather than a generic one. It also no longer owns the two acquisitions people remember. PayPal, bought in October 2002, was spun off as a separate public company in July 2015 and was worth more than eBay on its first day of independent trading. Skype, bought in 2005 for a use case that never materialized, was written down in 2007, sold in 2009 and eventually shut down by Microsoft.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did eBay start?
eBay started in September 1995, when Pierre Omidyar launched it from his home in San Jose, California under the name AuctionWeb. The site was renamed eBay before it went public on the Nasdaq on September 24, 1998, at $18 a share.
Who owns eBay?
No single person or company owns eBay. It has been publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker EBAY since September 1998, and its shares are held mostly by institutional investors such as Vanguard and BlackRock. Jamie Iannone has been chief executive officer since April 2020.
What was the first item sold on eBay?
The first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer, which went for $14.83 in September 1995 on the site then called AuctionWeb. The buyer, a Canadian named Mark Fraser, told founder Pierre Omidyar that he collected broken laser pointers, and identified himself publicly in 2015.