The History Of eBay Stock
When eBay sold its first item in 1995, it was known as AuctionWeb, the brainchild of founder Pierre Omidyar, who reportedly started the site as a way to help his fiancée with her Pez dispenser collection. The history of eBay stock is a startup success story and a cautionary tale, all in one.
1998 Public Offering
Between the time of that first sale and 1998, when eBay stock was publicly sold for the first time, the site grew exponentially in revenue and popularity. As detailed in the eBay biography book, eBay: The Perfect Store, the initial public offering was fraught with controversy.
In its early days, much of eBay's growth could be attributed to users who, enthusiastic about the Internet and the instant community experience it provided, volunteered hundreds of hours worth of their own time to make the site better. These users spent a great deal of time online teaching other users how to buy and sell on eBay.
When eBay stock went public, SEC rules governed which individuals eBay could offer stock to. Unfortunately, the volunteer users who had invested so much time and energy into the site were left out of the initial public offering, and many of them grew disillusioned with the site as they saw Omidyar and other eBay executives' profit greatly from their unpaid labor. But eBay offered other incentives, like benefits similar to employment benefits for its seller community. But none of them quite healed the sting of volunteers who felt they had been burned by the way the eBay stock IPO had been handled.
All eBay stock is traded in the Services sector on the Nasdaq 100 exchange and the AMEX Internet exchange. Its industry category is catalog and mail order houses. This is a category that speaks volumes of the SEC's reluctance to embrace ecommerce as a legitimate stock market entry.
As a company, eBay boasts 15,500 full time employees, and it now operates three specific segments. Marketplaces such as the online site everyone is familiar with, payments, evidenced by its relatively recent purchase of PayPal, the online banking service and communications, as seen by eBay's recent purchase of Skype Internet phone services. Stock in Ebay is sure to grow in value as it develops the payment and communications divisions the same way its online community has developed.
Key Executives
The executive suite at eBay has changed recently due to the retirement of CEO Meg Whitman, she was replaced by John Donahoe. The company's CFO is Robert Swan, general counsel is Michael Jacobsen and Pierre M. Omidyar remains with the company as its founder and chairman.
