Companies eBay Owns & Operates

eBay owns several companies. You most likely know that they bought out Paypal a few years back, but that's not the only site they own and operate. Like Amazon, eBay survived the dot com bubble of the mid 1990s and has been quietly growing its primary business as well as acquiring other interests. This hub looks at and explores those other companies.

Paypal started in 1998 as a company using a specific form of electronic payments between two parties using the internet for these transactions to take place. It charges a fee depending on the type of transactions and also if the transaction occur via credit card or from another country. Paypal was acquired by eBay in 2002. There were many electronic ways from several different companies to make transactions for payments to occur online, including those at the time offered by Citibank, Western Union and Yahoo. Yet it was Paypal that was the buyers choice and until its acquisition, buyers by more than 50% were using Paypal on paying their eBay transactions.

Paypal manages accounts in over 25 currencies, hundreds of countries, over 230 million accounts and millions of transactions daily. There is a hint of rumor that Paypal will look into using Near Field Technology for transactions on mobile devices for payments methods in the future.

half.com offers books, textbooks, music, movies, video games, and video game consoles, but instead of using a fee to list it sells on a commission basis for these products. Sellers are required to ship sold items within three days and usually pay any shipping fees.

Craigslist started off as a website offering listed classifieds and was commenced by Craig Newmark when he arrived in the San Francisco Bay area in the mid 90s. Not knowing anyone he started sending emails to people containing information about local or social events in the area. This then grew into a forum on a website and later, classified ads were added. Now the sites offers classified ads, resumes, services and products for sale, community services and event postings, gigs, job adverts and personals.

eBay acquired Craigslist in 2004 yet only has a 25% stake with Craig Newmark with a larger share and Jim Buckmaster (current CEO of Craigslist) with the remaining third share

Gumtree a local classified ads to help out those moving between places or residences was started in 2000 in England and acquired by Kijiji, a subsidiary of eBay. Gumtree offers free listings and paid listings to appear on the front home page. The site is very popular and available in South Africa, Canada, Australia, England, Poland, France, Canada and Dubai.

Most likely eBay's most expensive purchase to date. Skype is a video to video singular or multi party video or voice over IP telephony service over the internet. Skype to Skype services are usually free, although there are payable services on offer as well. eBay had hoped to use Skype as a means of buyer and seller communicating through eBay before and during transactions. It was met with very little prospect of that eventuating.

A 70% stake was offered as an IPO offering which was acquired by Silver Lake Partners in 2009. Microsoft then in May 2011 purchased Skype for a staggering 8.5 billion US dollars, its largest ever purchase of a company.

Meetup, rent.com, shopping.com., stubhub and bill me later are some of the other approximately 30 companies purchased by ebay over the last 16 years. These companies offer bills paying services, previous auction and online auction sites (most likely competitors at one time) social meetup services and online product sales.

All of these companies offer back end solutions, additional markets or more services avilable to the eBay group of companies and their customers.