Pierre Omidyar is credited with being the inventor of E-Bay. E-Bay history says the website was developed in 1995 in San Jose California in the living room of Omidyar. Originally E-Bay was Auction Web, but was owned by Omidyar's consulting firm Echo Bay Technology Group. His first choice for a name was Echo Bay, but the name was already taken.

The end of the first year of E-Bay history, an employee had been hired and shortly thereafter its first president was hired. Throughout the rest of the 1990's and up to the present date, E-Bay has been actively moving forward with major acquisitions and expansion almost constantly. These include

* 1998 - Up4Sale
* 1999 - Billpoint (shut down after the acquisition of PayPal)
* 1999 - Butterfield & Butterfield
* 1999 - Alando (Germany)
* 1999 - Kruse Auctions
* 2000 - Half.com acquired for $318 million
* 2001 - iBazar, Mercado Libre and Lokau (South America)
* 2002 - PayPal acquired for $1.5 billion in stock
* 2003 - CarAd.com
* 2003 - EachNet (China) acquired for $150 million cash
* 2004 - Baazee (India) acquired all outstanding shares for $50 million cash
* 2004 - Craigslist acquired 25% share from former employee
* 2004 - InternetAuctionCo (Korea)
* 2004 - Marktplaatz.nl (Netherlands)
* 2004 - Rent.com for $415 in cash
* 2005 - Gumtree (UK)
* 2005 - Loquo (Spain)
* 2005 - Shopping.com
* 2005 - Opus Forum (Germany)
* 2005 - Skype acquired for $2.6 billion in shares and cash
* 2006 - Meetup investment of $2 million in social networking site
* 2006 - Tradera.com (Sweden) acquired for $48 million
* 2006 - Google agreed upon cooperation deal with no details forthcoming.

In looking at E-Bay history in this way, it is hard to fathom how the company could have grown so fast. The amazing growth makes it well worth studying as a successful business model.

E-Bay history shows very few hiccoughs in its march to domination of the online auction marketplace. The diversification of the company is proceeding, but that may be due to the fact that no other auction company online or off has been able to match the prowess of E-Bay.

The successful march of E-Bay history is at least partly due to never losing sight of the direction. The stated business model of E-Bay is not to sell, but to bring buyers and sellers together. The goal as stated has been so tremendously successful that more businesses should look at methods such as that found throughout E-Bay history to be as successful as the original.

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