You may be surprised to know that eBay was created 12 years ago or just about anyway. As of this writing that is less than a month away. The website, eBay was created by Pierre Omidyar in September 1995. At the time he was living in San Jose, California, USA. It is said that Pierre wrote the code for eBay in one weekend.

eBay was a pioneer in several ways. The original name of the site was actually "AuctionWeb" and was part of a website called Echo Bay. It was not too long after the launch, that people started calling the site eBay anyway. The first item sold on eBay was Omidyar's broken laser pointer. The managed to sell it for a whopping $14.00!

Ebay become immensely popular very quickly. Sellers came on the site to list all sorts of oddities and more remarkably, buyers actually bought them. At first ebay operated on the honor system as sellers and buyers seem to trust each other. This allowed Pierre to let the site almost run itself.

From the outset, ebay was designed to collect a small fee on each sale. This money was used by Omidyar to pay for the expansion of the business. As the fees quickly added up to more than his regular salary, Pierre quit his job to concentrate his efforts full time on his website. In 1996 Pierre installed the feedback system on ebay. This allowed buyers and sellers to rate each other instilling even more confidence in other users of the site.

In 1997, Omidyar changed AuctionWeb's - and his company's - name to 'eBay', which is what users had been calling the site for a long time anyway. Pierre spent a lot of money on advertising, and also redesigned the eBay logo. It was in this year also that ebay sold it's one-millionth item.

In 1998 during the peak of the dotcom boom, eBay became a big business. The money made available to internet investments during this era allowed eBay to bring in senior managers and business strategists, who took the company public. This started to encourage people to sell more than just collectibles, and eBay quickly became a massive website, and a very large business.

To this extent, you you could sell anything, large or small to anyone who could pay for it. Unlike many other websites however, eBay survived the inevitable dot com meltdown, and is still going strong today.

In 1999, ebay expanded worldwide. It launched sites in the UK, Australia and Germany, bought half.com in 2000. Half.com was an online retailer much like Amazon. In 2000 as well, eBay introduced Buy it Now. Ebay also purchased PayPal, an online payment service, in 2002.

Pierre Omidyar has now earned an estimated $3 billion from eBay, and still serves as Chairman of the Board. Interestingly, he keeps a personal weblog at http://pierre.typepad.com. There are now literally millions of items bought and sold on eBay every year. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay This is a huge portion of all online purchases.