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 with operations in about 32 countries, as of 2019. The company manages the eBay website, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a wide variety of goods and services worldwide. The website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items after a limited number of free listings, and again when those items are sold.

The AuctionWeb was founded 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. Astonished, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to ask 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 site allowing person-to-person transactions, and its popularity boomed.

Reportedly, eBay was simply a hobby for Omidyar until his Internet service provider informed him he would need to upgrade to a business account due to his high website traffic. The monthly price increase from $30 to $250 prompted him to start charging eBay users.

In addition to eBay's original auction-style sales, the website has evolved and expanded to include: instant "Buy It Now" shopping; shopping by Universal Product Code, ISBN, or other kinds of SKU number; online classified advertisements (via Kijiji, or eBay Classifieds); online event ticket trading (via StubHub); and other services. eBay previously offered online money transfers as part of its services (via PayPal, which was a wholly-owned subsidiary of eBay from 2002 to 2015).

According to en.wikipedia.org