What is eBay?

What is eBay? I think the site’s official mission statement does a good job of summing up what eBay is all about:

eBay’s mission is to provide a global trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything.

What eBay does is simple: It facilitates the buying and selling of merchandise between users, over the Internet, in an auction format. This makes eBay a person-to-person auction site. eBay itself doesn’t buy or sell anything; it carries no inventory and collects no payments. eBay is just the middleman in the auction process, hooking up buyers and sellers around the worldand collecting fees for doing so.