The Perfect Store : Inside eBay

by Adam Cohen

eBay is the single most visited commercial site on the internet—and one of the most successful. Perfect Store tells the story of eBay's humble beginnings—launched from a spare bedroom in Pierre Omidyar's house—to its current status today—with 1,664,000 visitors a day, 20 million registered users and 75,000 people relying on eBay for their income.

eBay turned a profit in its first month and went on to change the face of business, creating the 'perfect market'.

The book reveals details of the company's rapid rise and the fascinating impact it has had on its users through the virtual marketplace. It examines the range of customers, from the woman who wakes at 3:00am to bid on a toaster, to the woman who had to rent a warehouse for her thriving business selling bubble-wrap. Perfect Store reveals why eBay has succeeded when so many dot-coms have failed, and provides essential reading for those trying to understand how the Web is changing business, and for those trying to anticipate the next big thing.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Technology, Biography, History, Internet, Economics

320 pages, Hardcover

First published May 25, 2003

Reviews

[Sameer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Educational read about the first few years of eBay but wish there was an update with later developments.

[Alvar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book about the early days of eBay. Would recommend.

[Connor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent history on the founding of eBay. But published in 2002 the story was just beginning. And the narrative is too focused on anecdotes about individual product categories.

[Eugenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book about the very beginnings of Ebay. I became a 'member' in about 2001. This book covers the years from about 1995-2001. I was hoping for more of the 'crazy stories' about how the site has been used in unexpected and amusing ways, but the story of how the ideas formed and were carried out is interesting too.

[Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really great book about the founding of eBay and it’s early culture, I was a little out of by the fact that it is 20 years out of day being published way back in 2002, 5 years before the first iPhone! But surprisingly it does exactly what it set out to do. Chart eBay’s origins and culture through its early years and past the Dot.Com bubble burst and a great book for anyone who wants to know how it all started.

It is funny to see how somewhat arrogant the eBay team was towards the start of the new millennium, going so far as to say they were better than Amazon because focused only on one thing. Especially since it was doing just about everything that would rocket Amazon to biggest global retailer in the world and the second richest company in the world 😂

It’s also funny because they take shots at Amazon but failed to realise that before anyone sold anything on eBay it had to first be purchased and used for it then to even make its was onto eBay being sold as “secondhand” and who was the company that would soon be selling all those items to buyers? Amazon.

It amazes me how different the internet and internet based companies and their culture were back then compared to know. They talk about a lot of their problems and most of them stem from not “involving the community” which translates to not letting a bunch of middle aged people who use eBay and engage in their eBay message boards in on their decisions which staggers me!

Can you imagine Apple asking their sellers for permission before removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7? Or Amazon asking the “community” if their next Prime deal is a good idea? Laughable 😂

EBay’s biggest problem wasn’t that it didn’t “involve the community” it was letting these people think they had any say whatsoever! It even went so far that the “community” felt outraged that they weren’t involved in the companies public IPO and allowed to buy early stocks! Just because you use eBay doesn’t mean you are a part of the company! I could not stop laughing reading how these idiots would get all up right because eBay changed something to their website but didn’t first post it on their community board 😂

As I said this was a great book while dated does everything it set out to do and it was very well written without feeling the need to stroke the egos of the company execs he interviewed.

My only gripe is that the chapters weren’t named so I had no idea what year or time period or what the next chapter was about until I was reading, a small thing but when your talking about a companies founding and history they really help, maybe the author should have posted it in his “community” message boards 😂

5/5 Stars would definitely read again ✌🏻🙌🏻🙏🏻

[Nam KK · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Perfect Store by Adam Cohen deserves a three plus stars, and an additional one for its beautifully written (and emotional) final chapter. The book chronicled ebaY's development, from a raw idea of "people are basically good" to the largest online auction website, that eventually made its founder(s) multi-billionaire(s). I love eBay and have approx. 500 stars on the website myself - at some point I was perhaps ebay addicted, but I only became a member in 2010, so it's great to learn about the company in details.

I found it quite fascinating how eBay succeeded in fending off competitors, both upstarts and much larger and threatening ones such as AOL, and Yahoo!. It is interesting to know that at the peak of the dotcom bubble, Yahoo! and eBay were in talks of an M&A. The market cap of Yahoo! was three times larger than eBay then - and after the burst, Yahoo! lost 95% of its market cap, while eBay only lost 50% of its valuation. The business model of eBay was so much more sustainable, with strong cash flow and super high gross margin - it was profitable since month one. Yahoo!, not quite. The Yahoo! as we knew it, well... And the rest was history.

I think that a reader with his/her interest in strategy would find the book interesting. It didn't focus on the financials of eBay though - I know that the company was financially sound, that it put its VC money into a bank for it didn't need it, but nothing much else.

It was sad to read in final chapters when founder(s) left the company after a transition period after its IPO, and that the company became just another corporation, ie. driven by bottom line (maximizing its shareholders value, or simply put, being corporate greedy, etc.)

A good read.

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good information on reselling items on eBay, Amazon, etsy, etc. It's an easy quick read. Great tips and hints. Keep in mind you are not going to get rich quick reselling. It takes work and time. What is hot and selling today may be dead tomorrow. What was selling a year ago for $1000 may be selling now for $10. I bought some items based on suggestions in the book of what is hot and didn't sell a one of them. I've bought some items that the books said not to buy, and then sold them and made some decent money on them.

You don't need to read every book on reselling. Read a few and take what is useful to you. Read them all and you will see MANY similarities in their information. You can still get something out of them, but don't feel the need to read all of them.

[Rogue Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love these business biographies written at the apogee of fame, market dominance and consumer acceptance. Cohen covers the background and details of individuals, places and economic moves leading up to the IPO and beyond to about 2001. Reflects well on Omidyar and Meg Whitman who continued his equitable approach to the market, balancing the needs of sellers and buyers. I can't imagine the treachery of those open communications and community expectations - shared governance it wasn't but boy they did their best. Perhaps most interesting is the perception of and defense against competitors and the development of new markets like eBay Auto. I wonder whether eBay's time has come and gone or whether it is just another market cycle.

[Aubrey Aubretia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at a time in history that a lot of us were here for but most of us did not think to document. This is a fascinating little slice of time that goes far beyond eBay. The world was changing, and as the book goes on it becomes sad in a way, because the frontier that the internet was at the time did morph and shift into the internet as we know it today. The colorful characters that emerged from the early days of both the internet and eBay did eventually phase themselves out into "a business major" and "someone from the legal team" over time. Gradually things went from an exciting, community driven, organic thing of something special, into business as usual.

Anyway, the problem is capitalism.

[Tab Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I liked the book. It intertwines eBay's story with stories of eBay users and community members. At first, this was exciting and interesting, but by midway through the book I found myself bored and skipping those sections (of which there are a lot). I wish the book was written a few years later as it was published prior to the PayPal acquisition. That being said I would rate the business portion a 5 star (some things are simply incredibly like employee #2 was hired solely to open up the mail containing the checks). I would rate the user/community vignette's a 2 star as there were too many, too detailed, and some simply uninteresting.

[KVG · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh. A fine history of a startup with interesting anecdotes. If you’d read this around time of release it’d have been rife with lessons on network effects, matching it’l markets, and aggregation theory - common concepts now. A good refresher. I get the book was also about eBay’s community but the anecdotes of members, especially in the last third, got really dull and distracting. The good ones would reground in lessons of business and growth. The bad ones would distract - and the saturation of bad ones increased near the end.

[Ritwik Manan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely an enjoyable read if you're looking at a book focused on the early years of the eCommerce giant.
I like the narrative style jumping between company focused story and seller/community stories. However, it gets tiring by the end. It does well to show the founding values for the companies that I think have endured over the decades. However, I would have liked a bit more macro-view of the time with the dot-com rise and bubble burst

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just loved this book.

[Jon. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic hisyory

This book is beautifully written. The stories it tells are engaging and hard to put down. As a fan of the company, it was interesting to see the bigger picture.

[L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting. From the origin to how it evolved and stories about seller/buyer influence.

[Naomi Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just an incredible case study demonstrating all of the aspects of eBay’s growth at various stages of its life. It’s exciting to start at the beginning of a company’s existence, and even the “knowing the ending” didn’t ruin the anticipation. Good as a business book but also as a story?! If I had a business book focussed book club this would be first on the list, so much to delve into here.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I became an active eBay.com user in mid-1998, about three years after Pierre Omidyar launched it. This book was certainly interesting to me in filling in what I missed and also jogging my memory on quite a few incidents I witnessed as a user.

This biography of a business attempts to tell the history of the first seven years of eBay.com. Of course tracking a business that grows from seven to over 15,000 employees in a few short years is a massive undertaking. Author Adam Cohen does a fairly good job of breaking it all down. He focuses on key personal and major events of the company and tries his best to lay it out chronologically. The twelve chapters all contain a number of articles pertaining to that time period, with certain important company characters we return to more than others.

Cohen deals not only with the employees but also with the eBay community. One of the more shocking revelations concerned an active forum member with the account name "Pongo." I remember Pongo but never in my wildest dreams would have guessed what was going on with her in her personal life. He also interviews the first seller to reach 10,000 feedback as well as a few anonymous users who have their own opinions of eBay's worth (or worthlessness).

It is also interesting to read this 2002 book in 2009 for the promises broken. The author states that Half.com was shut down by eBay. After the book was published eBay found that the Half.com community would not let it go and it still exists as a separate site today. He also talks about how the community disapproved of eBay selling advertising and also giving special preference to large corporate sellers, and how eBay decided to back off those ventures. Here in 2009 eBay is full of advertising and Buy.com and other corporate sellers are indeed being pushed in front of regular sellers.

I was expecting to read about the first eBay Live! convention but I guess that was in 2002, after the book was finished.

I recommend this book to fans or users of eBay.com. This book is a great refresher course of past history and an insight to where many of its traditions began.

[Jeff Brateman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an insightful, but dated, look into how ebay got started, through 2001. Some of the inside stories were comical, others were boring, but most of them had little cohesion with other stories in the same chapter. I had a hard time keeping up with timeline of events, as the author did not seem to place importance on keeping a story in one piece. In fact, you could call this book a collection of story snippets, mashed together in a loosely coupled fashion.

This was handed to me on my first day at PayPal (an ebay company), and two years later, will be put back into the closet to be sold at a later date, possibly on ebay. Actually, I need to give this book to my mom for the small stories about people making more money selling antiques on ebay than at consignment shops. All she needs to do is hire some immigrant labor, coast, and watch the money flow right in.

[Andi Boediman · Rating 3 out of 5]

An eBay origin story grounded in solid facts, but ultimately lacking depth, insight, and relevance.

Focusing on eBay’s early years, the book presents a clear historical account from both the company’s and the merchants’ perspectives. While the factual foundation is strong, it stops short of offering deeper analysis or sharper insights that would help readers truly understand the platform’s strategic significance. The material also feels dated, with no discussion of later, critical developments such as the PayPal and Skype acquisitions, which limits its value for contemporary readers.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting. I don't know anything about the history of the internet, and my only experience with eBay is as a buyer, but Cohen's fast-paced, timeline approach to the company's growth and development makes the story a veritable page-turner. The only problem is that it ends several years ago, and I'd like to hear his take on the dead zone that eBay is these days, at least for folks like me, shopping for vintage fish tank decor!

[Cyberpope · Rating 5 out of 5]

One ofg the best IT biographies I've ever read.

This takes you back to the extreme beginings of eBay, & walks you thruogh their unique model/philosophy that led to their first hire simply someone to open the thousands of envelopes coming in with cash &/or cheques in them

A delightful look back at when the internet was more about community & peple than spam.

[♡ Sassy ~ Amy ♡ · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is really for people who wanted to have 100's of items in their store at once. Today it is no longer.... ebay has phased out the stores. It's a good book for hints to get your own creativity running, but... thats it.

[Vivek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read to know how Pierre created a wonderful virtual marketplace.The book will explain you how the "Network effect" plays an important role in a competition! ==>> Google+ lost to facebook because of it!

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting story of improbable start-up success. It's written in Newsweek-level English, and the conclusions undoubtedly would have been a bit less optimistic if it had been written in 2005, 2010, or even now in 2015 as opposed to in 2001. Still, it's a fun story.

[Angela Sun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written account of eBay's history and evolution. Cohen's in depth journalistic writing puts you on the ground with eBay. I initially thought reading this in 2014 would be pretty dated, but it gave a fascinating history of one of the most successful online marketplaces in Internet history.

[Alvina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man, if only I had been in on the ground floor...

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best ebay book by far. Great!

[Kulveer · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're interested in EBay, you should read this. It has an interesting history as a company, and explains why the operate the way they do.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

now why didn't i think of that

[Bill Seitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit out-dated now. And not terribly insightful. But a decent compendium of tidbits.