Part One : eBay's history and basicsEBay is a great website -- the world's largest garage sale, online shopping center, car dealer and auction site with 147 million registered users in 30 countries as of March 2005. EBay was founded in San Jose, California, on September 3, 1995, by French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb, part of a larger personal site that included. In 1997, the company received approximately $5 million in funding from the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. In November 1996, eBay entered into its first third-party licensing deal, with a company called Electronic Travel Auction to use SmartMarket Technology to sell plane tickets and other travel products. The company purchased PayPal on October 14, 2002. As the web's domain name, it was because of when Omidyar tried to register the echobay.com but found it already taken by the Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company, so he shortened it to his second choice, eBay.com. There is a very funny story of the eBay's very first item sold on eBay. It was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Astonished, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to ask if he understood that the laser pointer was broken. In his responding email, the buyer explained: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers." On September 21, 1998, eBay went public and both Omidyar and Skoll became instant billionaires. The eBay BasicseBay has built a large online person-to-person trading community on the Internet. Buyers and sellers are brought together on ebay, where sellers are permitted to list items for sale and buyers are easy to bid on his interested items. Whole of the process runs in a mainly automated way. eBay has also both streamlined and globalized traditional person-to-person trading. This facilitates easy exploration for buyers and enables the sellers to immediately list an item for sale within minutes of registering.e price. If a bid exceeds the seller's maximum price, eBay notifies the buyer and seller via e-mail and closed the auction. The binding contract of the auction is between the winning bidder and the seller only. Browsing and bidding on auctions is free of charge, while sellers are charged two kinds of charges. When an item is listed on eBay a nonrefundable Insertion Fee is charged, which ranges between 30 cents and $3.30, depending on the seller's opening bid on the item. A Final Value (final sale price) fee is charged at the end of the seller's auction. This fee generally ranges from 1.25% to 5% of the final sale price. Part One : eBay's history and basicsPart Two: Browsing & Searching on EbayPart Three : How to Buy on Ebay |
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