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eBay Inc. is an American global e-commerce company situated in San Jose, California, which encourages consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995, and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. eBay is a multibillion-dollar business platform which operates in about 32 countries, as of 2019. The organization manages the eBay site, an online sale and shopping site in which individuals and businesses purchase and sell a wide variety of products and services around the world. The site is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for posting items after a limited number of free postings, and again when those items are sold.
The AuctionWeb was established in California on September 3, 1995, by French-born Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as part of a larger personal site. One of the first items sold on AuctionWeb was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Surprised, Omidyar reached the winning bidder to inquire if he understood that the laser pointer was broken; the buyer explained: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers." It soon became the first online auction website permitting individual to-individual transactions, and its popularity boomed.
Jeffrey Skoll was employed as the first new president of the organization in early 1996. In November 1996, the E-Commerce platform entered into its first third-party licensing deal, with an organization called Electronic Travel Auction, to use SmartMarket Technology to sell plane tickets and other travel items. Development was exceptional: from 250,000 auctions during all of 1996 to 200,000 in January 1997 alone.
In addition to eBay's original sale style deals, the site has developed and expanded to include: instant "Buy It Now" shopping; shopping by Universal Product Code, ISBN, or other kind of SKU number (through Half.com, which was shut down in 2017); online classified advertisements (by means of Kijiji, or eBay Classifieds); online event ticket trading (by means of StubHub); and different services. eBay recently offered online cash transfers as a feature of its services (by means of PayPal, which was a completely owned subsidiary of eBay from 2002 to 2015).
On September 25, 2019, it was declared that Devin Wenig would be stepping down as eBay's CEO, and that Scott Schenkel, senior VP and CFO since 2015, had been appointed as the interim CEO. On April 13, 2020, it was reported that Jamie Iannone would become the CEO on April 27. On June 15, 2020, eBay clarified that Wenig and five different employees were fired in September after a law enforcement warning in August because of a possibly criminal case of harassment of journalists perpetrated by some of the fired employees. The six of them were charged of Aggressive Cyberstalking.
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