Online marketplace/Ecommerce
The first product sold on eBay, the auction website, was a broken laser pointer. In September 1995 its founder, Pierre Omidyar, posted it for sale on a website he first named AuctionWeb. The pointer sold for $14.83. When Omidyar asked whether the buyer understood that the pointer did not work, he was reportedly told: “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.”
Two months earlier Jeff Bezos had opened Amazon.com, but Omidyar was more interested in the business of helping others sell online – by creating an open-access marketplace where they could be matched with buyers.
In part he used old ideas: the auction and the outdoor marketplace. What was new about the eBay online flea market was that it tested whether strangers ...
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