iAuction4u.co.uk 20 Facts About ebay

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20 Facts about ebay & how it all started

1) ebay turned 14 years old this year (2009), eBay was created in September 1995, by a man called Pierre Omidyar, who was living in San Jose, Pierre started eBay as AuctionWeb by an experiment, as a side hobby basically, while he had a day job. What began as a side hobby has today become the worlds largest personal online trading community. The website hosts nearly four million auctions every day, with almost half a million new items being added for sale every 24 hours.

2) The very first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83.

3) Top five most expensive items ever sold on eBay are:

1. Gulfstream II jet: $4.9 million (the eBay fee would be over $70,000)
2. 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card: $1.65 million
3. Diamond Lake Resort, western Kentucky: $1.2 million

4. Shoeless Joe Jackson's "Black Betsy" baseball bat: $577,610
5. Round of golf with Tiger Woods: $425,000.

4) ebay user jayandmarie was the first eBay member to reach 100,000 feedback, which happen in 2002.

5) eBay averages more than 1 billion page views per day, eBay users worldwide trade more than $1,839 worth of goods on the site every second.

6) eBay engineers have to add about 10 terabytes of new storage every week to cover new transactions.

7) eBay has such high margins partly because it has no factories or inventory, but also because its customers do the work, If ebay employed 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.

8) ebay has 233 million registered users worldwide.

9) At any given time, there are approximately 100 million listings worldwide, and approximately 6.4 million listings are added per day. ebay users trade in more than 50,000 categories.

10) The town of Bridgeville, California was sold for $1,777,877 on eBay. However the winning bidder backed out of the deal and Bruce Krall subsequently purchased it for $700,000. It was placed for sale on eBay once again on April 4, 2006, with a starting price of $1,750,000

11) 95% of ebays sellers are individuals or small businesses, Every minute a mobile phone sells on ebay.co.uk, A piece of jewellery sells every 6 minutes on eBay India, Over 30,000 NEW and USED clothing, footwear, & accessory items are sold every day on eBay.

12) Water that was said to have been left in a cup Elvis Presley once drank from was sold for $455. The few tablespoons came from a plastic cup Presley sipped at a concert in North Carolina in 1977.

13) Aug. 26, 1999: A human kidney is offered on eBay. Before the auction is taken down, bids reach $5.7 million.

14) $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.

15) As of 2006, eBay has 600 million listings and about 204 million registered users.

16) A Ferrari Enzo sports car - one of only 399 built - sold for Â£544,000 in 2003.

17) One of the weirdest item sold is a chewing gum spat out by Britney Spears which went for Â£270.

18) In the aftermath of both the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, the Tonight Show auctioned off two Harley-Davidson motorcycles, which had been signed by various celebrities. The winning bid for the motorcycle auctioned after the Tsunami was $800,100.

19) There was at one point an auction for the first ride on Kingda Ka, the tallest roller coaster on Earth. The winning bid was $1691.66, and the winner rode in the front seat.

20) eBay has already expanded to almost two dozen countries including China and India. The only places where expansion failed were Taiwan and Japan, where Yahoo! had a head start