The history of eBay

1995 – The online auction website was founded as AuctionWeb in San Jose, California, on September 3, 1995, by French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar.

1996 – eBay hires its first employee. In November 1996, eBay entered into its first third-party licensing deal, with a company called Electronic Travel Auction to use SmartMarket Technology to sell plane tickets and other travel products.

1997 – January 1997 the site hosted 2,000,000 auctions, compared with 250,000 during the whole of the previous year. The company officially changed the name of its service from AuctionWeb to eBay in September 1997 when it received $6.7m from venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.

1998 – March 1998 the company has 30 employees, half a million users and revenues of $4.7m in the United States. eBay went floated on the stock exchange on September 21, 1998 making its founders billionaires. eBay's target share price of $18 but the price went to $53.50 on the first day of trading.

2002 – In February 2002, the company purchased IBazar, a similar European auction web site founded in 1995 and then bought PayPal on October 14, 2002.

2008 – In early 2008, the company had expanded worldwide, had hundreds of millions of registered users, more than 15,000 employees and revenues of almost $7.7bn. In late 2009, eBay sold Skype for $2.75bn, but retained a 30pc stake.

2010 – July 2010, eBay was sued for $3.8bn by XPRT Ventures for allegedly stealing information shared in confidence by the inventors on XPRT's own patents. In December this year eBay outlines plans to buy a German online shopping club called brand4friends for €150m. The deal is subject to competition inquiries in 2011.