About eBay Part III EBay Fine-Tunes its Strategy, Auction or Buy Now? About eBay: Pierre Omidyar, a freethinking French national, founded eBay in May 1996. In 1997, he attempted to achieve funding for his fledging online flea market, eBay, by traveling to the then-technology hotbed of Silicon Valley. Benchmark Capital, a venture capital firm with "teams" in Silicon Valley, Europe, and Israel, agreed to invest nearly $7 million into the company. In early 2002, eBay, Inc. provided the technology for buyers and sellers to come together to trade items on a worldwide venue. eBay was a U.S.-based dynamic pricing online trading platform (Auction) located at Ebay.com. The Company developed a web-based entity that served as an online flea market and as an online alternative to classified advertisements to buy and sell items. Auctions are markets where prices vary (dynamic pricing) depending on the competition among the participants who are buying or selling products or services. T...