Most eBay Stores Have Been Operating for Years, Some Since 1996

Today we analyzed eBay sellers by the year they joined the marketplace. eBay was founded on September 3, 1995, 21 years ago, and since then ecommerce as a whole has changed drastically. Yet as we found in our research many of the retailers from 90’s are still around today.

Currently there are over 400,000 stores with products on offer. There are more eBay sellers than that, but we are focusing on those who run eBay businesses as opposed to listing a few odd items. Out of those 19,000 stores were launched this year.

Yet there are stores still operating since eBay launch. For example filkomstamps specializing in postal history and philatelic covers since April 1996. There are over 300 shops still open 20 years later. Thousands of sellers have been on the platform for more than 10 years, many were able to turn their hobbies into a retail business by selling in various niche markets.

We observed that many currently active sellers joined during the last few years, which is a promising indicator for eBay. Over 100,000 new sellers join Amazon marketplaces every month, but most of them end up failing to have even a single sale. eBay marketplace is not growing as fast, but there is a solid growth in new stores every year.

Interesting to see 1999 be one of the top years. We couldn’t come up with a good guess why that happened, but 1999 was right in the peak of the dot-com bubble so that might have had something to do with it.

Year LaunchedSellers with Products
201426,500
201324,700
199924,500
201524,400
200324,000
201223,700
200223,300
200422,800
200121,700
201121,600
200521,200
200020,800
200619,200
201019,000
200818,200
201618,200
200917,500
200717,300
199813,600
19973,000
1996350
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Juozas Kaziukėnas

Founder of Marketplace Pulse, Juozas wears multiple hats in the management of Marketplace Pulse, including writing most of the articles. Based in New York City. Advisor to other startups and entrepreneurs. Occasional speaker at conferences.

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