Product Description

Ebay (www.ebay.com) is the single most visited commercial site on the internet - and one of the most successful. The Perfect Store tells the story of eBay's humble beginnings, launched from a spare bedroom in Pierre Omidyar's house, to its current status today - with 1,664,000 visitors a day, 20 million registered users and 75,000 people relying on eBay for their income. eBay started as a way to help Omidyar's fiancee trade with other collectors. It turned a profit in its first month and went on to change the face of business, creating the 'perfect market'. - Reveals details of the company's rapid rise and the fascinating impact it has had on its users through the virtual marketplace. - Examines the range of customers, from the woman who wakes at 3.00am to bid on a toaster, to the woman who had to rent a warehouse for her thriving business selling bubble-wrap. - Reveals why eBay has succeeded when so many dot-coms have failed. - Provides essential reading for those trying to understand how the Web is changing business, and for those trying to anticipate the next big thing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #159971 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Adam Cohen is the chief technology writer for Time and the co-author of American Pharaoh. He has written for Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Tribune and the Harvard Law Review. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating history of a dot.com
This is not a 'how to sell on Ebay' book. It is a detailed and very readable history of the birth and development of one of the most successful dot-coms.
For anyone who lived through the overinflated bubble that marked the start of the evolution of the internet into the commercial mainstream, this will help explain what was happening inside one of the leaders. It contrasts dramatically with, for example, the demise of Boo.com as described in the equally interesting book BooHoo.com.
If you have worked for a company that started out lean, agile, idealistic and entrepreneurial and slowly found it becoming mired in legal issues, HR, internal politics and general inertia, you will find it all rehearsed here.
Although this book won't start that Ebay busines for you, it will help you understand how Ebay has become what it is today.

Good start, tails off a bit towards the end
This is a good recounting of the EBay story - it's not a 'how to sell on Ebay book (most of which are fairly useless anyway).
Unfortunately the author doesn't try to 'frame' the story at all, he just tells the story without comment and by about half way through it all starts getting a little dull.
Some comment on why eBay did so well when other auction sites didn't and what the future holds would have been very interesting.
If you want commentary on the effect the internet has had on people Michael Lewis's book 'The Future Just happened' is much better.

The people behind eBay
A story of the people and decisions that took ebay from an idea that the perfect market could be realised into a multi-billion dollar company that survived the dot-com crash. This mostly concentrates on the people involved in the early days, but takes time to dwell on outsiders that ebay brought into the fold as well as a few who remained firmly outside. Fascinating.