The Internet pioneer that's coming to Ireland made its money with a simple idea. Shane Hegarty reports
It began with a Pez dispenser. In 1995 a collector of the character-based sweet holders complained to her fiancé, Pierre Omidyar, of how difficult it was to contact fellow traders. From his bedroom Omidyar set up a website to help her, putting into practice a few theories he had about using the Internet to let ordinary people do business. And so eBay - which confirmed this week that with its payment service, PayPal, it would be bringing 800 jobs to Dublin - was born.
By the day of their wedding, four years later, Omidyar was the 35th richest man in the US, worth $4 billion. The website had become a global car boot sale, home to the world's bric-a-brac, collectibles, attic detritus and pretty much anything anybody believed someone else, somewhere would want to buy.
The millionth item sold by eBay was a yellow plastic music box topped with a picture of Big Bird, from Sesame Street. It is on display at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters.
Such is the volume of trade on the site that nobody knows what was the billionth item sold.
Today eBay is the world's largest e-commerce hub, bigger than Amazon's. The company has more than 40 million users worldwide, and on any given day there are 12 million items for sale across 18,000 categories.
You can buy fossils, wedding dresses, private jets or sports memorabilia. Earlier this year the entire town of Carlotta, in California, went up for auction. Unable to generate local interest in the 33-acre logging town, the estate agent followed the example of near neighbour Bridgeville and put the place up for grabs, with a reserve of $1 million. The Carlotta sale gained publicity here when Graham Norton's website claimed he was interested in buying it. In the end Norton demurred, and Carlotta failed to attract the reserve price. It was one of eight Californian towns to put themselves up for auction, but none of them sold.
The eBay site doesn't sell products but offers a forum through which buyers and sellers meet without leaving home, then takes a cut when they strike a deal. The site's free-range nature means it attracts a plethora of publicity seekers, hoaxers and weirdos.
An anonymous trader recently listed Iraq, marketing it as "the world's biggest sandbox". The lot included its historical sites, people, Saddam Hussein and "oil, oil, oil", with bids opening at 99 cents. Offers reached $99 million before eBay finally removed it from the site.
Last year a man offered to sell his last breath. In 1999 a man (15/16ths German, 1/16th Irish) offered "high IQ" sperm, but eBay doesn't allow body parts to be sold.
More distasteful items include the kidney offered by a Maryland trader in exchange for a $2.5 million donation to charity. Bids had reached $6 million before eBay stepped in and withdrew the lot. Within hours of the space shuttle Columbia disaster, debris from the accident had been posted on the site, triggering a bidding frenzy before eBay again intervened. Among the other items banned from trading are Nazi memorabilia, used medical devices, human remains, animals, credit cards and the artwork and signatures of notorious murderers.
The esoteric nature of some of its lots can obscure the more prosaic trading that has made eBay such a success. Although it began as a marketplace for collectibles and antiques, much of its business is now in electronic equipment. It is also estimated that eBay accounts for 1 per cent of all used car sales in the US. Such is the self-policing nature of the site that the company didn't even realise people were selling cars until one of its executives looked for a toy Ferrari only for his search to turn up two full-sized ones.
It has no large warehouses and no delivery costs. For a company wedded to the notion of trust, one of the secrets of its success was not trusting itself. During the dotcom boom, while most other companies were run by young, inexperienced managers fuelled by the fumes of the gold rush, eBay was appointing experienced managers from traditional business backgrounds.
Its chief executive is Meg Whitman, the woman who launched the Teletubbies toys in the US. It didn't spend for the sake of it when times were good and now sits on cash reserves of $1.5 billion.
An unusual and disparate cottage industry has grown around eBay. A survey in 2001 claimed about 10,000 people had become full-time traders on the site. This trend is typified by the "bubble-wrap lady", who, after accidentally buying too much of the packaging material, put it up for sale on eBay. Encouraged by its quick sale she set up a successful business selling bubble wrap on the website.
The site has had such an impact that in the UK, where the car boot sale is a national institution, professional traders now complain that the supply of goods is drying up as sellers go straight to eBay instead.
With a global auction room sellers will also often get far better prices than they would standing in the rain in a field.
As the real markets shrink the virtual one keeps on growing. This week on eBay you could buy a new diet pill that "guarantees" you will lose 90 pounds by November, a copy of the 1939 Dáil debates, nine Real Madrid shirts signed by David Beckham - and 292 lots of Pez dispensers.
Some items offered for sale
on eBay's website have
been considered just too
weird and withdrawn by the company.
Debris from the space
shuttle Columbia was
on sale within hours of the explosion. Bids started at $10,000.
A Maryland eBay user offered his kidney in exchange for a $2.5 million donation to charity. Bids reached $6 million before eBay withdrew the lot.
Francis D. Cornworth of Florida tried to sell his virginity. From a reserve price of $10, bids reached $10 million before eBay stepped in.
Half-eaten French toast, apparently munched by the pop star Justin Timberlake, was offered in aid of charity in 2000, reaching $3,154 before being withdrawn.
A New Yorker offered "drug-free urine", although it was "not for illegal purposes". Bidding started at $100.