
Forget Google, Facebook, Amazon or even China’s Alibaba, eBay is older than them all and has now made it though two decades.
From its humble beginnings at the hands of a French-born Iranian-American computer programmer, it now has 25m sellers, 157m buyers and 800m listings. It has also helped span hundreds of multi-million pound enterprises that only trade using eBay, opening entrepreneurs up to an easily-accessible global market at the click of a button. To shed some more light on eBay, we looked at the weirder side of things and selected our favourite ten factoids. (1) The first item sold though the online auction platform, in 1995, was a laser pointer pen (2) It was originally called AuctionWeb when set up by Pierre Omidyar, and didn?t change until 1997 (3) Having IPO?d in September 1998, shares in eBay have risen by 84.5 times though both the dot.com bubble at the turn of the millennium and global recession of 2008 (4) It first came to the UK in 1999, when a CD from The Scorpions for ?2.89 became the first item sold though eBay.co.uk (5) In 2008 it was noted that sales on eBay.co.uk surpassed the GDP of 68 countries around thew world Read more about eBay:- Why eBay knows more about export than the UKTI
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- Who’s at risk from HMRC pursuing tax-evading sellers at eBay and Etsy?
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