eBay

Overview

eBay Inc. is a San Jose, California-based online marketplace founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb, where individuals and small businesses sell to buyers worldwide through auctions and fixed-price listings (Encyclopaedia Britannica). It earns its money from that trade — transaction fees and advertising — rather than by selling its own inventory, and in 2024 it reported $10.3 billion in revenue on $74.7 billion in gross merchandise volume, with 134 million active buyers (eBay Inc.).

This profile covers the marketplace company eBay Inc. — not the auction format in general — and follows it from a 1995 garage-sale experiment through its years as an acquisition-hungry conglomerate, its deliberate unwinding of that conglomerate, and its narrower, trust-centred marketplace of the 2020s.

From AuctionWeb to a public company

Originally named AuctionWeb, eBay started as something like a giant garage sale, and its first sale in 1995 was a broken laser pointer for $14.83 (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Its early days coincided with the Beanie Baby craze, with collectors flocking to the site to buy and sell the plush toys (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The company outgrew its founder-run phase quickly: Meg Whitman joined as president and CEO in March 1998, and six months later eBay launched an initial public offering that nearly tripled its share price on the first day of trading (Marketplace). Shares were listed on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol EBAY (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Two features of that early marketplace still define it. First, sellers may set a fixed price that allows buyers to purchase instantly, so not every listing is an auction (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Second, eBay relies on its users to self-regulate through a feedback system that lets buyers rate sellers on transactions; sellers’ former ability to leave negative feedback on buyers was removed in 2008 (Encyclopaedia Britannica). That fee-based model also helped eBay weather the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, because it relied on transaction fees rather than advertising revenue (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Buying, then unwinding, a conglomerate

eBay kicked off a long acquisition spree in 2002 with its purchase of the digital-payments company PayPal, which many eBay users were already using to complete transactions (Encyclopaedia Britannica). It followed with a 25 percent minority stake in Craigslist in 2004, the comparison-shopping site Shopping.com and the classifieds site Gumtree in 2005, and, further afield, the internet-communications company Skype in 2005 and the ticket marketplace StubHub in 2007 (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Most of those acquisitions were later divested, and the pattern is the spine of eBay’s middle history. Skype was sold in 2009 at a loss to private investors, and Microsoft acquired it in 2011 for $8.5 billion (Encyclopaedia Britannica). PayPal was spun off into an independent company in 2015, the same year eBay divested its Craigslist stake (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

The activist-driven round of sales came next. After hedge fund Elliott Management, holding about 4 percent of eBay, argued the company would generate more value by selling or spinning out its components, eBay confirmed it was offloading StubHub to Viagogo in an all-cash deal worth $4.05 billion — a substantial markup on the $310 million it had paid in 2007 — with the deal expected to close in the first quarter of 2020 (VentureBeat). The divestment saga had already cost chief executive Devin Wenig his job the previous September, after he disagreed with the board’s new direction, leaving chief financial officer Scott Schenkel as interim chief executive (VentureBeat). The classifieds business followed: on 24 June 2021 eBay completed its transfer to Adevinta for $2.5 billion in cash plus about 540 million Adevinta shares, a 44 percent equity interest, with total consideration valued at about $13.3 billion (SEC filing).

Trust was the product: payments, authentication and collectibles

The through-line the deal history obscures is trust — the problem of getting strangers to trade with each other, solved in successive layers. The feedback system was the first layer. The second was payments: when eBay spun off PayPal in 2015, the two companies set a five-year operating agreement under which PayPal remained eBay’s primary payments provider, and in early 2018 they decided not to renew it (The Motley Fool). Once that agreement expired in July 2020, eBay expanded its own managed-payments business in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, processing payments for about 42,000 sellers and $4.7 billion in merchandise volume in the United States and Germany, with European processor Adyen as its partner (The Motley Fool).

The third layer was authentication for high-value enthusiast goods. In January 2022 eBay expanded its authentication service to trading cards worth at least $750, after a category that had seen $2 billion in transactions in the first half of 2021 — as much as in all of 2020 — and was growing significantly faster than the marketplace as a whole (TechCrunch). That August it agreed to acquire TCGplayer, an online marketplace for collectible trading card games founded in 2008 from Syracuse hobby stores, in a deal valued at up to $295 million and expected to close in the first quarter of 2023, with TCGplayer continuing to operate autonomously (TechCrunch). The collectibles push also explains a personnel bridge other company profiles miss: in 2021, Alt hired Nicole Colombo, previously eBay’s general manager of collectibles and trading cards, as its first president (TechCrunch).

The marketplace today

By 2024 the narrower eBay was a steady, profitable marketplace rather than a growth conglomerate: revenue of $10.3 billion, up 2 percent, merchandise volume of $74.7 billion, up 2 percent, and GAAP net income from continuing operations of $2.0 billion (eBay Inc.). Advertising had become a meaningful second line, generating $445 million in the fourth quarter alone, or 2.3 percent of merchandise volume (eBay Inc.). Under chief executive Jamie Iannone, the company framed its strategy as reinventing ecommerce for enthusiasts, investing in the United Kingdom consumer-to-consumer experience and expanding an AI-powered bulk-listing tool from sports trading cards to all United States categories (eBay Inc.; Encyclopaedia Britannica). Britannica puts the workforce at about 12,300 people worldwide as of 2025 (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

The enthusiast focus also drew an outsider’s attention: in May 2026 eBay confirmed it had received an unsolicited, nonbinding takeover offer from GameStop, led by Ryan Cohen, valuing eBay at about $55.5 billion, or $125 a share, and proposing to combine the marketplace with GameStop’s store network for shipping, authentication and live commerce (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Days later eBay rejected the proposal as neither credible nor attractive, citing concerns about financing, debt and the overall structure of the transaction (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

What this profile does not claim

• The price eBay paid for PayPal in 2002 and its IPO offer price are not stated: neither appears in a source read in full for this profile, so the profile claims only the acquisition year and the first-day share-price tripling.
• The widely repeated story that AuctionWeb was founded so Omidyar’s fiancée could trade Pez dispensers is deliberately not repeated; a 2007 Marketplace history states it as fact, but this profile omits it pending a fully-read source that settles the account.
• Gumtree’s sale timing is stated with a caveat: Britannica dates it to 2020, while the SEC filing records the classifieds transfer completing in June 2021. The profile treats 2021 as the completion date for the classifieds business as a whole.
• Managed-payments figures for 2022 ($2 billion revenue, $500 million operating income) were expectations stated in July 2020, not reported results, and are presented only as expectations.
• Later GameStop stake-building and partnership reports from August to October 2026 are not claimed, having been seen only in snippets and aggregators rather than read in full.
• The 2014 data breach and counterfeit-goods litigation covered in Britannica fall outside this profile’s focused scope and are neither detailed nor denied here.
• No 2025 full-year financial figures are claimed; the financial snapshot is 2024, the last full year covered by a fully-read results release.