This is what Ebay looked like in 1995
 

Im bored messing around with Alexa.com's way back machine

ebay

nuts how it came from that to what it is now :1orglaugh

even better

http://web.archive.org/web/199901170.../aw/index.html

Yah they were pretty big in 1995 as well. Does anyone know if they started off by letting sellers list for free? What were some of their first marketing practices that gave them such a lead

I think what gave them the lead is they took the ability to make money and profit from the internet and put it in the hands of even the smallest businessman with the most limited knowledge of the web.

Damn, pretty normal for the times though

Always nice to take a stroll down memory lane with the Wayback Machine

they have always asked a fee

media attention and viral (word of mouth) marketing

The time change . . . :)

Its amazing how far they have come.

viral for sure...

been doing tons of research about methods/techniques/concepts to perfect this, it is very sweeeet but very difficult way to market an operation.... but of course, dirt ass cheap heh.

FF

weird 95 was the last time I used ebay.

eBay never thought they would get bigger than the bay area. The "e" in eBay stands for "East" which is the east side of the bay area.. where they started out.. but little did they know.. they were going to become a monster.

I believe the reason they achieved such a fast growth was due to the fact that people could actually make good money selling stuff on it instead of getting small amount of money for the stuff that they didn't want as on other auction sites.

This was a new concept and got a lot of attention. Due to the fact that so many people were starting to sell so much stuff for cheap, the word got around that they could buy stuff for much cheaper on ebay than from the store.. and it took off from there..

Another push came from PayPal, because it made it much.. MUCH easier for people to buy stuff from eBay

Was eBay started by a poor college student like a lot of other multi billion dollar internet companies these days?

Or was it started by an actual corporation with a good business plan?

If it was started by a college student, I am suprised that they made it through their begining stages without a large corporation stealing their idea and using their power and money for better marketing and attention.

I don't think eBay would have needed as much backend and programming as something like Yahoo or Google at that time

pretty sure it was started by a guy for his gf.

:1orglaugh