eBay

I've been covering consumer technology for decades, and I can tell you that eBay remains one of the most underappreciated success stories of the internet era. While everyone obsesses over the platform companies that emerged later—your Ubers and Airbnbs—eBay was running the playbook in 1995: connect buyers and sellers, take a cut, use reputation systems to build trust between strangers. Pierre Omidyar built this thing out of his living room based on the radical notion that regular people would mail each other stuff if you gave them a mechanism to trust the transaction. That bet proved correct on a civilizational scale.

The auction format, which defined eBay's early years, was actually genius for its moment. In a world before algorithmic pricing, before real-time market comparisons, before everyone had a smartphone to check whether $50 for a vintage lamp was reasonable—auctions let the market decide. You learned what something was worth by watching people bid on it. I remember the thrill of those early auctions, watching the countdown timer while babysitting a bid on a discontinued gadget, the pure market-making of it all. That format has faded as eBay shifted to fixed-price listings, but it proved that the internet could create efficient markets where none existed.

The feedback system deserves its own paragraph, maybe its own dissertation. Before eBay, commerce between strangers required intermediaries—credit card companies, escrow services, local newspapers with classified sections. eBay said: what if reputation was the intermediary? What if we let buyers and sellers rate each other, and that accumulated reputation became a kind of currency? The star ratings, the percentage positive feedback, the detailed seller ratings—this was social proof before we had the phrase, trust mechanics before game designers theorized them. Uber, Airbnb, and every gig economy platform owes their trust layer to what eBay figured out in the 90s.

The PayPal acquisition in 2002 was strategically perfect—own the marketplace and the payment rails—and the eventual spin-off in 2015 was probably a mistake, though reasonable people disagree. What's undeniable is that eBay enabled an entire economy of small sellers who would otherwise have had no market access. Vintage collectors, small manufacturers, liquidators, individual craftspeople: eBay gave them all global reach from their garages. The democratization of commerce rhetoric gets thrown around a lot, but eBay actually did it.

Today, eBay faces the same challenge as every marketplace: the gravitational pull of Amazon, which offers convenience and Prime shipping that individual sellers can't match. But eBay still works for what Amazon can't do: the unique, the used, the collectible, the weird. Try to find a specific vintage amp, a rare Pokemon card, an out-of-print book, replacement parts for discontinued appliances—eBay is where you end up. It's not sexy anymore, but it's essential. The site looks dated, the mobile app is functional if uninspired, but the core proposition remains sound: if it exists and someone wants to sell it, it's probably on eBay.