Word: site
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...estimated $15.5 billion by 2001. eBay is the dominant player in the online-auction world, with 7.7 million registered users bidding on some 3 million items. But other Internet heavyweights are hard at work trying to break off some of the market for themselves. Amazon.com added an auction site last spring. (It appears to be starting slowly; as of October, eBay had more than five times as many visitors as Amazon.com's auction site). Yahoo, the most visited site on the Web, introduced its own auctions last year. (Yahoo's big selling point: listing items is free.) And in September...
...Area. Omidyar was already an e-commerce pioneer (Microsoft eventually bought out eShop, a company he co-founded), but lately he had been wrestling with how the Internet could be used to create fairer markets. The Pez dilemma led Omidyar to the flash of an idea: an Internet auction site could function as the ultimate efficient market...
Omidyar wrote some code and over Labor Day weekend of 1995 launched what he called AuctionWeb, which was supported on the $30-a-month Internet service provider he was hooked up to from home. (The site's domain name was www.ebay.com and eBay was the name that stuck.) There were no Pez dispensers--that came later--but there were listings for a whole lot of computer hardware. eBay started out free, but it quickly attracted so much traffic that Omidyar's Internet service upped his monthly bill to $250. Now that it was costing him real money, Omidyar decided...
...listing for a broken $30 laser pointer that he was about to throw out. He fully disclosed that it didn't work--even with new batteries--and started it at $1. Inexplicably, a bidding war ensued, and someone ended up taking it off his hands for $14. Meanwhile, the site's revenues kept doubling: they were $2,500 the second month, then $5,000, then $10,000. Omidyar eventually had another insight. "I said O.K., I've got a hobby that's making me more money than my day job," he recalls. "So it might be time to quit...
...unwanted role: grievance officer. Buyers and sellers with complaints about each other were e-mailing him personally and asking him to step in. Omidyar urged them to work things out amicably between themselves. But if eBayers really had to gripe, he decided, they should do it publicly on the site. "I wanted to reinforce the notion that if you're going to bring a complaint about someone, do it out in the open," says Omidyar. "You can't come running to Daddy." He had one other proviso: if traders are going to complain about people they don't like, they...