The Perfect Market: A History of eBay — Part 1
7 min readAug 22, 2021
E-commerce seems inevitable in retrospect, but its initial prospects were fraught. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1995 only 8% of Americans were comfortable buying something online with a credit card. eBay is the great grandmother of US e-commerce, creating a market and blazing a trail for companies that would come after like Airbnb, Carvana, and Etsy. This is the first part of a deep dive into eBay, based on Adam Cohen’s book, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay.
