eBay Inc. is the world’s leading e-commerce company. It was founded as an online auction1 site in 1995 called AuctionWeb by Pierre Omidyar. He said: “What I wanted to do was create an efficient market, where regular people could compete with big business…It was a little bit of an experiment.”

He changed the name in 1997 to be similar to his company Echo2 Bay Technology Group. Within two years of starting, the company hosted 2,000,000 auctions3. The company website explains the success story to date: “With more than 90 million active users globally, eBay is the world's largest online marketplace, where practically anyone can buy and sell practically anything…In 2009, the total worth of goods sold on eBay was $60 billion -- $2,000 every second.”