eBay began as Auction Web ten years ago and was renamed eBay in 1997. Some key milestones:

• Auction Web starts charging users a percentage of the sale fee in February 1996, becoming a real business for the first time. The feedback system, allowing buyers and sellers to rate each other, is introduced
• Monthly revenues reach $10,000 in June 1996, prompting Mr Omidyar to leave his job and run the site full-time
• In 1997, the newly-renamed eBay marks its 1,000,000th sale - a Big Bird toy, based on the Sesame Street TV character
• Meg Whitman joins as chief executive in 1998. Later that year, the company goes public - more than one million people are registered users and 8% of the items on sale are Beanie Babies
• eBay sets up local sites in the UK and Germany in 1999 and overcomes a serious crash that closes the site for 22 hours
• Surviving the dotcom bust, it overtakes Amazon as most visited e-commerce site in 2001 and buys the Paypal online payment service in 2002 - but suffers a setback in Japan, withdrawing from the market after losing out to Yahoo!