In 1998 where the dotcom booming reached its peak, eBay, the world's first online auction site became even bigger. It started to encourage people to list more than just collectible items, and rapidly became a gigantic website where you could sell almost anything you have in mind, large or small, from an antique coin to an aircraft carrier. eBay survived the end of the dotcom booming and is still going strong today.

Ultimately, eBay bought out half.com, an Amazon-like online retailer, in the year 2000 (the same year it introduced ?Buy it Now? feature) and finally acquired PayPal, the largest online payment service, in 2002.

Pierre Omidyar, the founder, has now earned approximately $5 billion from eBay, and still serves as Chairman of the Board. Strangely enough, he still keeps his personal weblog at http://pierre.typepad.com. There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, by professional traders and ordinary folks from all over the world. It is once estimated that for every $100 spent online worldwide, $14 is spent on eBay. That means; eBay owns 14% share of total global spending on the Internet.

With that said; who dares to defy its influence?

Now that you know the history, perhaps you'd like to know how to make money on eBay? Well, there are a few little things that you have to keep in mind if you want to get started.

Making money on the world's biggest online auction site is basically a single click away. eBay doesn't care who you are, where you live, what your background is, or what you look like. The PowerSeller on eBay can be an old man from a large company or a teenage girl you just met this morning on the street.

The bottom line is; everybody can have the same opportunity to make money.

eBay tears down the barriers to earning a decent income that the real world always puts up, because there's no job interview and no commuting involved. If you can post things, then you can make money on eBay. It's that simple.

For example; if you know some place to get a low priced item so that you could resell it for a reasonable price, then you can resell the item on eBay. And because you can get more discounts if you purchase in bulk quantity all the time at wholesale market, it's not exactly hard to make a living on eBay!

Now, if you want to test the water first before you get your feet wet and commit to actually stock anything, then you can just find things that you've got lying around in your house and then sell them on eBay for a profit. Search through that cupboard of things you never use, and you'll probably got a few hundred dollars' worth of stuff lying around in there!

Believe me, there is always someone out there who wants what you're selling, whatever it might be. The best part is; you don't even need to do anything else to get them to buy your item because they will come looking for it themselves.

And that is the true power of eBay.