In 1995, the first product in eBay history was sold. The only problem is that it was broken

In 1995 the Internet was not what it is now. Many of the great companies and sites related to the network were born then. AuctionWeb was the first official name of what we now know as eBay. Its creator, Pierre Omidyar, gave that name to a personal project that he wrote from his home in Silicon Valley taking advantage of one of the classic long weekends in the US, Labor Day.

How do they count in The Perfect Store: Inside eBayfaced with the need to test whether that personal auction website worked, Omidyar grabbed the first thing he had on hand: a laser pointer. The choice was not random. Two weeks after buying it, it had broken, so he thought that if he managed to sell it, he wouldn’t lose anything if they gave him very little money for it.

For a week that laser pointer that had cost him 30 dollars He failed to receive a single offer. Pierre Omidyar had not lied and admitted in the description of the item on AuctionWeb that it was indeed broken. There was no way to make it work.

A week after being published on the Internet, that AuctionWeb object received the first offer for it. Pierre Omidyar asked for one dollar but the auction ended up closing at $14.83. What was his surprise that, even though he had already warned it in the advertisement, he preferred to make sure that it was clear to the buyer that the object purchased was broken and wrote him an email. Despite everything, the buyer kept it because it was just what he was looking for.

This was eBay in 1995, when it was a personal project called AuctionWeb

Mark Fraser I had seen some of those pointers and wanted one. But they were still quite expensive, on the order of $100 in those years, so he relied on his skill as electrical engineer to build yours. And he needed a part that he thought he would get from the broken pointer that was being sold on a new online site that he had found out about through a referral in the forums and information exchange places that he frequented on the Internet.

Today, and as he confessed in a funny video that could be seen at eBay’s 20th anniversary party, the pointer still doesn’t work but he still has it.

In Xataka |