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.