All You Need To Know About eCommerce Giant: Ebay.com

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eBay is the perfect market when you want to buy or sell things. Whether these things are old, new, unique, used or anything in between, it’s the perfect platform for any merchandise.

The platform itself was launched in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar. His goal was to create an online marketplace where the sellers and buyers would be able to connect.

And in the next twenty years, eBay grew from a marketplace where a single broken laser pointer was first sold, to a gigantic eCommerce website. People have been selling things like collectibles, cars, electronics, accessories, and even things like bagged air from a Kanye West concert and Justin Timberlake’s half-eaten sandwich.

Nowadays, with the various features that eBay has included over the years, such as eBay vouchers, eBay discount codes, and flash sales that include items available for a short amount of time, you can do all of your shopping online and at a very low price.

The main goal of the website has been achieved, as you can buy practically anything you could ever want or need with just a few clicks. There are people selling pieces of Mars bars, the meaning of life, an imaginary friend, the right to name someone’s baby, but also really cool things such as makeup products, recipe books, cute knick-knacks for your home, and even toys for your pets.

Over the years, as the website grew, it also acquired different companies. Thus far, eBay has had about 60 acquisitions in total, starting from their first one, named Up4Sale in 1998, which was an online auction company, with their latest one being near the end of 2017, called Terapeak, which analyzes data in order to help the sellers on eBay to know exactly what the buyers need.

One of the more notable and interesting acquisitions that eBay has made so far was Elon Musk’s PayPal, as a better and more secure way to do the transactions on the platform. Another interesting acquisition was the popular website Craigslist, where people could not only buy and sell things, similarly to eBay, but could offer their services and look for jobs.

Then there was Rent.com, which was aimed at apartment searching for the Millennials and Shopping.com, where eBay actually integrated their online comparison feature.

Another interesting purchase was StumbleUpon, which is a discovery engine where the users could rate the discovered websites.

The biggest purchase that eBay has made, to this day, is Skype Technologies, or just Skype. The eCommerce giant managed to acquire this big telecommunications company back in September of 2005 for the whopping $2.6 billion.

Some of the less popular companies that eBay has bought over the years include iBazar, an online classified ads platform; Meetup, which is an online social networking service where people can organize and meet up in real life; Flipkart, an India-based electronic commerce company that later even launched their own product range; and Twice, another online marketplace where people could buy and sell second-hand apparel.