Getting Started with Ebay Marketing
By Dottye Blake
If you have ever read an article on eBay, you'll have discovered the type of
income people earn - it isn't strange to find out about people earning thousands
of dollars per month on eBay. Next time you are surfing the eBay site, check out
how many PowerSellers there are: you'll find quite a few.
Now think about the fact every single one of them must be making at least
$1,000 per month, as that's eBay's requirement for becoming a PowerSeller.
Silver PowerSellers make at least $3,000 monthly, while Gold PowerSellers make
more than $10,000, and the Platinum level is $25,000. The top level is Titanium
PowerSeller, and to measure up you must make at least $150,000 in sales each month!
It's hard to believe that Ebay has been around for ten years. eBay started in
September 1995, by a man named Pierre Omidyar, who was residing in San Jose,
California. He envisioned his site - formerly known as 'AuctionWeb' - to be an
internet mart, and composed the first code for it in one weekend. It was one of
the first sites of its type on the planet.
The name "eBay" follows from the domain Omidyar applied to his internet site His
company's name was Echo Bay, and the "eBay AuctionWeb" was formerly just one
part of Echo Bay's website at ebay.com. The first product ever traded on the
site was Omidyar's defective laser pointer, which sold for $14.
The web site rapidly became hugely popular, as vendors arrived to auction off
all sorts of strange things and buyers actually purchased them. Relying on faith
appeared to work out outstandingly well, and implied that the web site could
just about be left alone to run itself.
The internet site had been configured from the beginning to take in a small fee
on every sale, and it was this revenue that Omidyar applied to finance
AuctionWeb's expansion. The fees speedily totaled up to more than his salary at
the time, so he resolved to quit his job and devote attention to the site full-
time. It was at this point in time, in 1996, that he added the feedback
capability, to let buyers and sellers rate one another and make purchasing and
trading safer.
In 1997, Omidyar modified AuctionWeb's - and his company's - name to "eBay",
which is what people had been using to refer to the site for awhile. He started
to spend a great deal of money on promotion, and had the eBay logo created. A
milestone was reached in this year - the one-millionth item was sold (it was a
miniature version of Big Bird from Sesame Street).
Then, in 1998 - the peak of the dot com company boom - eBay became big business,
and the investment in Internet businesses at the time allowed it to bring in
senior managers and business strategists, who took in public on the stock
market. It began to encourage people to trade more than only collectibles, and
rapidly morphed into a huge site on which you could trade anything, big or
little. Different from the other websites, though, eBay endured the final stage
of the bonanza, and is still going strong nowadays.
1999 saw eBay go worldwide, unveiling sites in the UK, Australia and Germany.
eBay purchased half.com, an Amazon-like internet retailer, in the year 2000 -
the same year it inaugurated Buy it Now - and bought PayPal, an internet payment
service, in 2002.
Pierre Omidyar has now cleared an estimated $3 billion from eBay, and still
serves as Chairman of the Board. There are now literally millions of items
bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent
online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay - that's a lot of
laser pointers.
The fact that these PowerSellers are around gives you some idea of the money
possibilities on Ebay. Most of the power sellers never intended to even launch a
commercial enterprise on eBay - they merely began trading a couple of items, and
then continued.
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