Online auction is a business model in which items are sold through bidding conducted over the internet rather than in person, spanning both business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets, with automated systems tracking bids and enforcing the auction's rules. Online auctions date back as far as 1979 on services such as CompuServe, and dedicated auction websites began in 1995 with Onsale.com, founded by Jerry Kaplan, which itself acted as the seller of the goods. Later that year Pierre Omidyar founded eBay on a different approach, letting individual sellers auction directly to individual buyers rather than selling its own inventory, and this peer-to-peer model proved far more popular, making eBay the largest consumer-to-consumer online auction site and a dominant force in early online retail.
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