Ask for It by Name!

If Pierre Omidyar had been a little quicker on his feet, the name “eBay” would be nothing but an annoying typo today.

In 1995, Omidyar, a French-Iranian immigrant and Silicon Valley veteran, created a web site he called Auction Web, an electronic flea market where visitors could hawk Beanie Babies, computer gear and the Pez dispensers his then-girlfriend (now wife) collected. Unfortunately, the internet gold rush was by then in full swing, and the domain name “auctionweb.com” was already taken, as was “echobay.com” (after Omidyar’s Echo Bay Technology Group). But “ebay.com” was ripe for the picking, and Omidyar snapped it up. And from that third-choice domain name the internet’s premier auction site grew. Today on a typical day there are more than 16 million items up for auction on eBay in more than 16,000 categories, and in 2002 eBay members unloaded more than $14 billion dollars worth of goods on the site. Presumably, Mrs. Omidyar now rarely gets outbid on Pez dispensers.

Since domain names on the internet do not distinguish between upper and lower case letters, the distinctive capitalization “eBay” was not, strictly speaking, necessary. But the alternative “ebay” would most likely have usually been pronounced “eh-bay” or “eb-ay,” more evocative of a startled diner (”Eb-AY! That’s hot!”) than a multi-billion dollar business empire. The lower-case “e” prefix also evokes the great 90s “e-commerce” boom, a boom of whose fizzle eBay is probably most the wildly successful survivor. As a verb, “to eBay” might well mean “to make pots of money from the very first day.”