How eBay built a new world on little more than trust

The ratings system introduced by the biggest car boot sale on earth is now used by everyone from Uber to Airbnb

Twenty years ago this month, a French-born Iranian-American computer programmer named Pierre Omidyar added an experimental online auction section to his personal website, which at that time focused mainly on the Ebola virus. He called it AuctionWeb because it enabled people to bid to purchase items that other people were advertising for sale. One of the earliest, and most puzzling, sales on the site was of a broken laser pointer, which went for $14.83. The story goes that Omidyar wrote to the buyer asking if he understood that the laser pointer was broken. The guy replied that he was a collector of broken laser pointers. At this point, Omidyar realised he might be on to something.

He was: he called it eBay. The idea that one could use the web as a way of putting buyers and sellers in touch with one another was not new. But up to then that affordance of the technology had been seen mainly in the context of firms. It was the basis, for example, for the early and rapid growth of so-called B2B (business-to-business) sites. The critical twist that Omidyar added was that the same technology could work for ordinary people. And so he created what turned out to be the greatest car boot sale in the history of the world.