50 free EBay trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
eBay began as a hobby site called AuctionWeb in September 1995 and became one of the defining companies of the internet, and this quiz covers the whole story: the broken laser pointer that sold for $14.83, the Pez-dispenser legend a PR manager made up, the Beanie Babies that were a tenth of all listings, the 1998 IPO, the PayPal, Skype and StubHub deals, the retreat from China and Japan, the CEOs from Meg Whitman to Jamie Iannone and the cyberstalking scandal of 2020. Easy questions ask who founded it and what the name is short for; harder ones dig into the gold-mining company that owned echobay.com, the Oregon town that renamed itself Half.com, the Warren Buffett lunches that raised $53 million and the 2026 GameStop bid the board called neither credible nor attractive. It suits tech and business quiz nights, anyone who has ever sniped an auction, and general-knowledge fans who lived through the dot-com era. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on eBay, its founder, its executives and the companies it bought and sold, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who founded eBay in September 1995?
Pierre Omidyar
The French-born Iranian-American programmer built it as a hobby site to make some extra money.
Q 02What was eBay originally called?
AuctionWeb
It was renamed eBay in September 1997 after Omidyar's consulting firm, Echo Bay Technology Group.
Q 03What was the first item ever sold on the site, for $14.83?
A broken laser pointer
Omidyar checked whether the buyer knew it was broken; the man replied that he collected broken laser pointers.
Q 04The story that eBay was founded so Omidyar's fiancée could trade Pez dispensers is what?
A myth invented by a PR manager in 1997
The tale was fabricated to interest the media and has been repeated ever since.
Q 05Why did Omidyar shorten the name from Echo Bay to eBay?
echobay.com was already owned by a gold-mining company
Echo Bay Mines held the domain, so eBay.com it was.
Q 06What prompted Omidyar to start charging fees in early 1996?
His ISP raised his bill from $30 to $250 a month
The site made $1,000 in its first month of fees and $2,500 in the second, more than it cost to run.
Q 07What was the job of eBay's first employee, Chris Agarpao?
Processing mailed cheque payments
Fee payments arrived by post in the pre-PayPal days.
Q 08Who was hired as eBay's first president in 1996?
Jeff Skoll
The Canadian later founded Participant Media, producer of Spotlight and An Inconvenient Truth, and the Skoll Foundation.
Q 09Which toys accounted for about 10% of all eBay listings in 1997?
Beanie Babies
Omidyar even listed eBay's dependence on the Beanie Babies market as a risk factor in the 1998 annual report.
Q 10Which venture capital firm invested $6.7m in eBay in 1997?
Benchmark
The stake became one of the most celebrated returns in venture history after the 1998 IPO.
Q 11Who became eBay's president and CEO in March 1998?
Meg Whitman
The company then had 30 employees, 500,000 users and $4.7 million in revenue; she stayed a decade before running for governor of California.
Q 12At what price did eBay's shares open on NASDAQ at its September 1998 IPO, before closing at $53?
$18
The first-day close gave the company a market value of nearly $1.9 billion.
Q 13Which Oregon town renamed itself "Half.com, Oregon" for a year in a publicity stunt?
Halfway
The company paid $100,000 and donated 20 computers; eBay bought Half.com in 2000 and shut it down in 2017.
Q 21Which Chinese rival's Taobao platform drove eBay's market share in China from 85% to under 8%?
Alibaba
eBay shut its Chinese site in 2007; its paid listing model and lack of chat features counted against it.
Q 22Competition from which company forced eBay out of Japan in 2002?
Yahoo!
The same year eBay entered China and bought a Taiwanese auction firm.
Q 23The 2006 Supreme Court case eBay v. MercExchange concerned patents on which feature?
Buy It Now
The Court ruled that an injunction is not automatic in patent cases where infringement is proven.
Q 14How much did eBay pay for PayPal in October 2002?
$1.4 billion
It phased out its own Billpoint payment service three months later.
Q 15Which activist investor pushed eBay to spin off PayPal, completed in July 2015?
Carl Icahn
eBay later replaced PayPal as its main payments processor with the Dutch firm Adyen in 2018.
Q 16Which internet calling company did eBay buy for $2.6bn in 2005?
Skype
It never fitted the marketplace; eBay sold 70% in 2009 and Microsoft bought the whole company for $8.5 billion in 2011.
Q 17How much did Microsoft pay for Skype in May 2011, after eBay had sold most of its stake?
$8.5 billion
eBay had kept a 30% minority interest after the 2009 sale to a Silver Lake-led group.
Q 18Which ticket-resale marketplace did eBay buy for $310m in 2007?
StubHub
It sold the business to Viagogo for $4.05 billion in cash in 2020.
Q 19Which classifieds site did eBay take a 25% stake in for $32m in 2004?
Craigslist
The stake led to years of litigation before eBay sold it back to Craigslist in 2015.
Q 20Which British classifieds website did eBay acquire in May 2005?
Gumtree
It launched its own classifieds brand Kijiji the same year and sold the whole classifieds business to Adevinta in 2020.
Q 24Who replaced eBay's long-serving CEO in January 2008 when she left for politics?
John Donahoe
Whitman left to enter politics and lost the 2010 California governor's race to Jerry Brown.
Q 25Whose Paris court victory in 2008 forced eBay to ban sales of its perfumes, counterfeit or not?
LVMH
The court awarded €40 million in damages; a Troyes court fined eBay €20,000 over two fake Hermès bags the same month.
Q 26Which jeweller sued eBay in 2004 over fake silver jewellery on the site, and lost?
Tiffany & Co.
A federal judge ruled in 2008 that eBay had no legal duty to monitor sellers for counterfeits.
Q 27What is the practice of bidding in the final seconds of an auction called?
Sniping
Shill bidding, by contrast, is a seller secretly bidding to inflate the price.
Q 28What is "shill bidding"?
A seller secretly inflating the price with fake bids
eBay has been criticised for not doing enough to combat it.
Q 29Annual eBay charity auctions for lunch with which investor raised $53.2m for the Glide Foundation?
Warren Buffett
Winning bids ranged from $2 million to $19 million for the final lunch in 2022.
Q 30For how much did 41 senators' letter complaining about Rush Limbaugh sell on eBay?
$2,100,100
The money went to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation for children of fallen service members.