1) ebay turned 14 years this year (2009) & was created in September 1995 by a man called Pierre Omidyar who was living in San Jose. Pierre started ebay as AuctionWeb as an experiment or a side hobby basically while he had a day job. What began as a hobby has today become the world’s largest personal online trading community. The website hosts nearly four million auctions every day.

 

2) The very first item sold on ebay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. More than the price of a new one.

 

3)  7 Unusual items Sold on ebay.

 

3.1) Gulfstream II Jet, $4.9 million  (The ebay fee would be over $70,000)

3.2)  Diamond Lake Resort, western Kentucky, $1.2 million

3.3)  A Round of golf with Tiger Woods,  $425,000.

3.4)  Lady Thatcher's Handbag, £103,000

3.5)  Max the Mammoth (Pre Historic Skeleton) £61,000.

3.6)  Decommissioned Nuclear Bunker, £14,000.

3.7)  David Beckham Football (missed penalty in Euro Match 2004) £18,700

 

 4) ebay averages more than 1 billion page views per day, users worldwide trade more than $1,839 worth of goods on the site every second & ebay engineers have to add about 10 terabytes of new storage every week to cover new transactions.

 

5) ebay's high margins are partly because it has no factories or inventory & also its customers do the work, If ebay employed all the people who earn all or most of their income selling on its site it would be the second largest employer on the FORTUNE 500

after Wal-Mart.

 

6) At any given time there are approximately 100 million listings worldwide & approximately 6.4 million listings are added per day. 

 

7) 95% of ebay sellers are individuals or small businesses with more than 68,000 people earning their primary or secondary income from trading on ebay.co.uk alone. (ACNielsen International Research, Feb 2006).

 

8) Aug 26 1999, A Human Kidney is offered on before the auction is taken down, bids reach $5.7 million.

 

9) $34.2 billion value of merchandise sold on eBay in 2004, equivalent to the GDP of Cuba, 147.1 million of registered ebay users in first quarter 2005, greater than the population of Russia.

 

10)  Some ebay.co.uk Selling Figures.

A Car sells every 2 minutes.

A CD sells every 7 seconds.

A Toy Car sells every 25 seconds.

A Laptop sells every 2 minutes.

An MP3 Player sells every minute.

A Woman's Handbag sells every 32 seconds.

A piece of Women's Clothing sells every 5 seconds.

A piece of Men's Clothing sells every 9 seconds.

A Football Shirt sells every 2 minutes.

A piece of Golf Equipment sells every 1 minute.