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Quote:The first version of eBid went online in January 1999. Immediately, Wilkinson began facing serious challenges. Another giant auction site, QXL.com, had launched around the same time. An offer to purchase eBid fell through in late 1999 when the dot.com crash hit. But eBid survived, thanks to its move to a free listing policy, the development of its own escrow payment service and PPPay.com, as well as to a healthy financial approach to business.

"From day one eBid has always been self sufficient," explained Wilkinson. "We've never taken venture capital or investors on board. In the early years this didn't really include a marketing budget. For any extra hardware we needed, we had to put a little away each month. Nowadays we are able to push market ourselves a little more and have built a stable and speedy hardware infrastructure that can cope with a large influx of extra users when needed." ...