Founded in September, 1995. At that time, Omidya's girlfriend liked Pez candy boxes very much, but she was distressed that she could not find like-minded people to communicate with.
So Omidya set up an auction website, hoping to help his girlfriend communicate with Pez candy box lovers all over the United States. This is Yi Bei.
What Omidya didn't expect was that Yi Bei was very popular, and soon the website was crowded with lovers who collected items such as Pez candy boxes and Barbie dolls.
The first item sold by Omidyar was a broken laser pointer, which cost 14.83 USD. He asked the winning bidder in surprise, "Don't you know this thing is broken?" Omidya received the following reply: "I am a player who specializes in collecting broken laser pens."
Jeff Skoll was hired as the first president and full-time employee of 1996 company. 1September 1997, the company officially changed its name to ebay. At first, the website belonged to Omedia's consulting firm Echo Bay Technology Group.
Omidya tried to register a website of EchoBay, but found that the website had been registered by EchoBay Mining Company, so he changed Echo Bay into his second record: Ebay.
From 65438 to 0997, Omidyar began to look for CEO for Yi Bei, and took a fancy to meg whitman, who was born in Harvard MBA and served as vice president of Procter & Gamble and Disney. Whitman refused to join Yi Bei because he had never heard of this place. After that, it was recognized by professional headhunter Benyr, which brought Yi Bei to today's glory.
Today, Yi Bei has 1.47 1 100 million registered users, sellers come from 29 countries around the world, and millions of products involving thousands of categories are sold every day, making it the largest electronic market in the world. In 2003, the turnover was $23.8 billion and the net income was $2.2 billion.
On April 20 15, PayPal was spun off from Yi Bei. According to the agreement, Yi Bei can't launch payment service for five years, and PayPal can't develop its own online trading platform for physical products.