eBay History Infographic 1995 – 2018

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Did you know that eBay was originally called AuctionWeb or that the founder originally wanted to change the name of the marketplace to ‘Echo Bay’ but the URL was already taken so it was shortened to eBay?

16Best have put together an infographic filled with this and a ton of interesting factoids tracing the history of eBay from it’s AuctionWeb launch in 1995 through to the present day. Naturally the infographic has interesting buyer related fun facts such as revealing the most expensive item ever sold on eBay (which went for $168 million) but there are also some interesting insights for sellers too.

eBay Stats

Of course there’s a comparison to Amazon, but this is slightly misleading as Amazon are a retailer in their own right and we also need to bear in mind that eBay divested PayPal and their Magento interests whereas Amazon have pretty much held on to all their different business interests. There are also some comparisons to other sites such as Etsy, Rakuten and Alibaba.

For those wondering what to sell, it’s interesting to note that the bulk of eBay users are working adults – 61% of all eBay users are between 35 and 64 years old so that’s the sweet spot you want to appeal to, with 31% being aged 18 to 34 and just 7% are sliver surfers aged 65 and over.

10-01-2018 eBay History Infographic

14 Responses

  1. 61% of all eBay users are between 35 and 64 years old , not so good that….not getting the young ones anymore.
    Where is the article??? with the History story…

  2. Who cares where they came from.
    Its more interesting where they are going..

    DOWN THE PAN!!!!!!

    They are pandering to the big companies and dumping all over the little business. sales down by massive margins. Google searches show they are dropping like an anchor.
    But they seem unable to work out where they changed things and went wrong. Maybe the staff will realise before its too late.

  3. Found it is the end thanks @tyler, it was not that good.
    Anyway the more interesting article on that blog was “Social Networks and their importance in Ecommerce Gateways”…so if your looking for an article to write about Tamebay this would be something of interest to a lot of people.
    What is scary in that one is Amazon in August 2017 have created a social media platform “still have not found that” lets hope it is as successful as G+.

    Social is the one big threat to the corporate dominance of Amazon and lesser eBay. The smaller players are being squeezed out by the corporates and this is where we need to concentrate efforts and target customers. There may be eBay daily deals, but they cannot swamp our offers with their corporate clients and chinese VAT avoiders on FB and Insta.

  4. @northumbrian not if you can do it correct, we know one girl who makes a fortune from makeup on Instagram and would never even look at selling on a place like eBay. We are relative novices but have felt comfortable enough to drop FBA this year and Google Adwords, and we gaining traction now through our social media especially on Facebook.
    End of the day your not sharing your shop Window with everyone else.

    We already see the millennials are not using the likes of eBay.

  5. 20 years ago we discovered ebay we were one of the only fish in the pond ,
    now there are shoals of them, in fact there are more fish than water in the pond now

    social media will be less effective and more costly the more success people have with it, lots of the excess fish will swim over from ebays pond

  6. trouble is because of ebay / amazon breeding program
    there are an awful lot more fish
    than ponds
    many new ponds are still full of sharks

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