eBay

One of the first businesses to design and promote an online marketplace connecting consumers and sellers of products and services was eBay.

eBay Inc. is a multinational American e-commerce enterprise with headquarters in San Jose, California, that enables both business-to-business and consumer-to-consumer purchases through its website. Pierre Omidyar launched eBay in 1995, and it quickly rose to prominence as a noteworthy dot-com bubble success story. As of 2019, eBay is a multibillion dollar company with operations in around 32 nations. The business operates the eBay website, a global marketplace where individuals and organisations may buy and sell a wide range of products and services. Buyers can access the website for free, but after a certain number of free listings, sellers must pay fees to post their goods and an additional or separate fee when those goods are sold.

Along with the immediate “Buy It Now” buying, shopping by Universal Product Code, ISBN, or another sort of SKU number (through Half.com, which was shut down in 2017), and other services have been added to eBay in addition to the traditional auction-style sales. Previously, eBay included online money transfers (through PayPal, a wholly-owned subsidiary from 2002 to 2015), online classified ads (via Kijiji, or eBay Classifieds Group), and online trading of event tickets as part of its services (via StubHub).