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eBay's First Sale Was Pierre Omidyar's Broken $30 Laser Pointer, and a Buyer Paid $14.83 for It
Over Labor Day weekend 1995, the founder of AuctionWeb, the site that became eBay, listed a laser pointer he said didn't work even with new batteries; it opened at $1 and sold for $14.83 to a Canadian named Mark Fraser.
Omidyar wasn’t trying to unload a treasure. His listing was a $30 laser pointer that had died two weeks after he bought it, as Time told it on the company’s 20th anniversary. The listing said plainly that it was broken. Bidding started at a dollar.
It didn’t stay at a dollar. When the auction closed, the pointer had gone for $14.83, nearly half of what it cost new, for a thing that did nothing.
The site was barely a site. The Centre for Computing History dates the launch to Labor Day 1995 and quotes Omidyar’s own statement from the following February: “I launched eBay’s AuctionWeb on Labor Day, 1995,” and “Since then, the site has become more popular than I ever expected.” The buyer, it adds, was a Canadian named Mark Fraser.
Fraser stayed out of the story for twenty years. He “came forward last week after seeing TV coverage of eBay’s 20th birthday celebration,” eBay’s own newsroom wrote in September 2015, and he had kept the original laser pointer the whole time. Why he wanted a broken one is the part nobody has pinned down. The popular version has him writing back that he collected broken laser pointers; another has him planning to fix it rather than pay full price for a new one. eBay’s profile of him doesn’t say, and we couldn’t find his reply in his own words.
The next marketplaces are being tested the same way, by people listing whatever is lying around to see if anyone bites. Most of those first listings will be forgotten. The interesting question is which of them a buyer is quietly keeping in a drawer right now.