ICYMI, It is the birthday of eBay today. 30 going on 70. Starting to need Artifical Intelligence to keep the old dog going. In ecomm terms, this is damn impressive. But looking in the mirror as we get older can be confronting.
Struggling for its place 30 years on, it is still a force in many catgegories. Rather than fall into type and become pre-loved, myself and Hendrik Laubscher think eBay needs to go back to its beginnings in communnity. In episode 4 of the Ostrich Report we looked back on the history of our old pin up gal, eBay.
They built the rails of online trust, ratings, auctions, seller feedback, but they didn’t own the next phase:
Payments → They had PayPal, the crown jewel, and let it slip away instead of becoming the global wallet. Hope Feedonomics lead the charge at Commerce in this light.
Logistics → Amazon built Prime; eBay left shipping to sellers. That meant inconsistency, no two-day magic, no lock-in.
Brand & Culture → Amazon became the mall, Shopify became the indie high street, Etsy became the creative bazaar. eBay never escaped being “the flea market.”
The big miss?
👉 eBay failed to integrate the full commerce stack, payments, logistics, and experience and so it stayed a marketplace, not the marketplace.
“Happy 30th, eBay: The Marketplace That Built the Internet, and Then Lost It” Born September 3, 1995 as AuctionWeb, it wasn’t just a company, it was the proto-marketplace.
“To understand eBay you have to understand ecommerce.”
eBay democratized commerce before Amazon was even out of nappies. Anyone with a Beanie Baby, a spare car part, or a dodgy fax machine could suddenly be a merchant. That C2C energy created cultural moments: the million-dollar sale of a broken laser pointer, whole economies of collectibles, and a new type of global hustle.
For us marketplace nerds, eBay was proof of concept: you didn’t need a warehouse to scale, you needed trust, feedback loops, and liquidity.
Then eBay Stopped Being Cool
eBay never became sexy retail. Amazon became your mall; eBay stayed your flea market.
Its management history is a graveyard of missed bets: they bought Skype, sold it, fumbled payments, and let PayPal walk.
The culture hardened. Instead of “anyone can sell anything,” it became “anyone can fight the algorithm.”
“To dig in on something like eBay is not a small task.”
Exactly. eBay is both visionary and tragic. It built trust online when no one trusted the internet — but it couldn’t evolve into the next phase of digital retail.
📚 The Learnings (That Still Matter Today)
Culture eats KPIs. eBay was built on a community culture. That’s why it worked.
Trust is a moat.
If you stop being curious, you stop growing.
How eBay feels at 30 : without eBay, there’s no Amazon Marketplace, no Etsy, no Facebook Marketplace.
Listen here:
In community with EVOLVE Commerce Club - Thank you folks
