It’s been 27 years since the first-ever eBay item was sold
Topics: Shopping, Technology, Good News
Daisy Phillipson
Featured Image Credit: eBay/M4OS Photos/Alamy
Topics: Shopping, Technology, Good News
Get ready to feel old, as it has officially been 27 years since the first-ever eBay item sold.
Yes, in September 1995, two men named Pierre Omidyar and Mark Fraser took part in a simple exchange, not realising that they'd just made history.
When eBay – formally known as AuctionWeb – was born, no one quite new that it would contribute to the revolution of the shopping industry as we know it.
Today we don't think twice about buying more or less anything we can think of online, but back then purchasing something on the world wide web was a novel and alien concept.
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The site was launched by Omidyar himself, who spent the entire Labor Day weekend that year writing code on his home computer.
After establishing AuctionWeb, which he described as a place 'dedicated to bringing together buyers and sellers in an honest and open marketplace', he decided to put his first item up for sale – a broken laser pointer.
Omidyar listed the product for just $1, and for a week nothing happened. But then it started – people began placing bids until the pointer ended up selling to Fraser, from Canada, for $14.83.
Up until 2015, no one knew the identity of the buyer or his reasoning for making the purchase, but this all changed when Omidyar shared a clip of Fraser at the 20th anniversary eBay Seller Summit.
Alongside being part of a milestone moment in the company's history, his reason for buying the pointer pretty much sums up why eBay was set up in the first place.
In the video, he says: "Back in about 1995 I was on the road doing quite a lot of presentations and I'd seen a couple of laser pointers and I thought 'boy I want one of those'.
"They cost something over $100 and I couldn't afford one, my boss certainly wasn't going to go for it, but I'm an electronics geek so I thought I'd build one.
"So I acquired a laser diode from one of our electronics suppliers and went about designing a circuit to make it work.
"Then I discovered that they put out a conical diverging beam and this just wasn't going to work."
At a loss of what to do, someone pointed Fraser in the direction of a 'new website' that we now know as eBay - and lo and behold, the first item for sale on there was the broken laser pointer.
He joked that he was a little bit 'offended' after the eBay team later said 'people will buy anything' when discussing the purchase, not taking into account that one person's trash is another's treasure.
But there are no hard feelings, and in 2015, Fraser said he's gone on to buy 2,000+ items from the sales platform.
"I'm just really, really grateful that eBay is there," he continued. "It's allowed me to indulge myself in collectables, but most importantly in hobbies that have been quite a lot of value."
And guess what? Fraser still has the pointer – and while he said he doesn't get any practical use out of it anymore, there's no doubt it holds a lot of sentimental value.
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