eBay

Pierre Omidyar opened AuctionWeb in 1995, and it became eBay. The premise was simple enough to miss how strange it was: a stranger would send money to another stranger for an object neither of them had shown to a shopkeeper, and a company in the middle would take a percentage.

eBay did not hold the inventory. The employment sat in trust. Someone had to handle disputes, payments, and the software that made a reputation score feel like a reference.

A market with a staff

Sellers were not employees. The people who were included engineers, a trust and safety staff, and customer service workers who decided which complaint was fraud. PayPal grew up beside the auction as the way the money moved, and eBay owned it for years. The job invented here, repeated across later platforms, is the moderator of other people's transactions. The goods are not the company's. The argument about them is.

Smaller, and still open

eBay spun PayPal out in 2015 and remains an independent marketplace. It is no longer the symbol of the internet economy. It is a business with a staff, a fee, and a long memory of how little infrastructure a market needs if the company is willing to let the buyers and sellers do the work.

A market with a staff

Smaller, and still open

The work it organized

On the timeline

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