2007-10-09

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Yes, you read that correctly: ten years. eBay was created in September 1995, by a man called Pierre Omidyar, who was living in San Jose. He wanted his site then called AuctionWeb to be an online marketplace, and wrote the first code for it in one weekend. It was one of the first websites of its kind in the world. The name eBay comes from the domain Omidyar used for his site. His company's name was Echo Bay, and the eBay AuctionWeb was originally just one part of Echo Bay's website at ebay.com. The first thing ever sold on the site was Omidyar's broken laser pointer, which he got $14 for.

The site quickly became massively popular, as sellers came to list all sorts of odd things and buyers actually bought them. Relying on trust seemed to work remarkably well, and meant that the site could almost be left alone to run itself. The site had been designed from the start to collect a small fee on each sale, and it was this money that Omidyar used to pay for AuctionWeb's expansion. The fees quickly added up to more than his current salary, and so he decided to quit his job and work on the site full-time. It was at this point, in 1996, that he added the feedback facilities, to let buyers and sellers rate each other and make buying and selling safer.

In 1997, Omidyar changed AuctionWeb's and his company's name to eBay, which is what people had been calling the site for a long time. He began to spend a lot of money on advertising, and had the eBay logo designed. It was in this year that the one-millionth item was sold (it was a toy version of Big Bird from Sesame Street).

Then, in 1998 the peak of the dotcom boom eBay became big business, and the investment in Internet businesses at the time allowed it to bring in senior managers and business strategists, who took in public on the stock market. It started to encourage people to sell more than just collectibles, and quickly became a massive site where you could sell anything, large or small. Unlike other sites, though, eBay survived the end of the boom, and is still going strong today.

1999 saw eBay go worldwide, launching sites in the UK, Australia and Germany. eBay bought half.com, an Amazon-like online retailer, in the year 2000 the same year it introduced Buy it Now and bought PayPal, an online payment service, in 2002.

Pierre Omidyar has now earned an estimated $3 billion from eBay, and still serves as Chairman of the Board. Oddly enough, he keeps a personal weblog at http://pierre.typepad.com. There are now

If you have even a passing interest in the topic of eBay Stores, then you should take a look at the following information. This enlightening article presents some of the latest news on the subject of eBay Stores.

In fact, you might not even have heard of eBay stores. Read on to find out what you've been missing.

eBay stores come at three levels: Basic for $15.95 per month, Featured for $49.95 per month or Anchor for $499.95 per month (yes, that is typed correctly: almost $500). The best place to start out is with Basic (you can even get a month's free trial), but if you like what you find then you should upgrade to Featured quickly, simply because it has so many extra features. Note that you must have a feedback rating of at least 20 before you can get an eBay store.

But what is an eBay store? Basically, it lets you list a set of fixed price auctions together on one page for much longer than auctions usually last and most sellers with eBay stores list the items at a slightly lower price. It's like a list of your special offers. You can put your logo on the store and write a little about your business and policies, and your customers can search your store for anything they might want. Buyers can click through to your store using the door symbol next to your name.

A good way to look at it is that it's a little like having your own e-commerce site outside eBay where you can list your items more long term except it's all done for you without you having to learn a new system. Items in eBay stores can be listed for 30, 60, 90 or 120 days, or you can list items permanently, paying monthly for each one.

So you Want an eBay Store Now?

If your eBay Stores facts are out-of-date, how will that affect your actions and decisions? Make certain you don't let important eBay Stores information slip by you.

You can visit eBay stores at http://stores.ebay.com. Go there now and click the Open a Store button on the right of the screen to start signing up for the free trial. Then there are a few steps to go before your store can open for business.

Step 1: Pick a theme. You can have whatever design you want on your store, but to begin with pick something from eBay's options that you think would be appropriate.

Step 2: Add your store's name, description and logo. You can pick one of eBay's pictures for the logo or upload a logo of your own if you have one. Don't worry, you can always change this later.

Step 3: Choose your subscription level, and then click Start My Subscription Now. Your store is ready! Remember that you can customise it more at any time.

Listing items in your store is just like listing items on normal eBay using Buy it Now, except that the durations you can choose from for the store are much longer.

By now, you've probably spent enough time on eBay that you're starting to get used to it - but then again, you also might have been a victim of fraud by now, or at least seen fraud happening to others. The next post will tell you how to fight eBay fraud.

Knowing enough about eBay Stores to make solid, informed choices cuts down on the fear factor. If you apply what you've just learned about eBay Stores, you should have nothing to worry about.

Are you looking for some inside information on eBay Buyer's Fraud? Here's an up-to-date report

From everything you've heard about the risk of fraud on eBay, you might think it's only buyers getting scammed but you couldn't be more wrong. Here are a few common scams that sellers fall for every day.

The Rubber Cheque.

This one obviously isn't limited to eBay it's been going on for years in all kinds of business. It works like this: a buyer sends you a cheque that they don't have the funds to cover and you pay it in your bank. You then send the goods right away, only to find out a few days later that the cheque bounced.

The solution to this is simple: don't send anything to a buyer until their payment has cleared, no matter how quickly they might say they need it. Advise them to pay electronically if they don't want to wait so long for their items. Then again, if your items are quite small, you could just take the loss from an occasional bounced cheque. Think of it as a small price to pay for faster and better customer service.

I Never Bought Anything!

Think about what you've read so far. Does it reinforce what you already know about eBay Buyer's Fraud? Or was there something completely new? What about the remaining paragraphs?

This is one of the riskiest scams to fall victim to. In this case, the credit card's real owner still has control over it no-one has stolen their details. They have realised, however, that they can phone up the bank who issued their card to say that it's being used fraudulently and they never bought any such thing, and the bank will often reverse the transaction without even investigating. The only way to beat this scam is to make all your sales through eBay, as they keep a record of transactions.

The Unconfirmed Address.

It is quite easy to steal PayPal accounts from inexperienced users: all you need, after all, is their email address and password. PayPal tries to protect against credit cards registered on stolen accounts being used to buy things by listing a confirmed address for each buyer an address that matches what is registered with their credit card issuer.

What many scammers will do is ask you to ship to a different address unless you're very sure of them, this is a bad idea, as they could be trying to commit credit card fraud. Be especially suspicious of anyone who wants to pay a higher price and get overnight shipping, especially if not even to the same country as the confirmed address. The fraudster is trying to make sure the item reaches them before they are discovered.

It's up to you to take responsibility for fraud on PayPal, as eBay's favourite way to refund fraudulent payments to their rightful owner is to just reverse it from you! This is considered an occupational risk of PayPal usage, and sellers who get burned severely sometimes go as far as moving to a rival electronic payment service.

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